Talking is a complex task in which a speaker must transform a communicative intent into a series of motor actions in real time. Empirical research on language production has revealed that it is a largely incremental process: speakers do not start with a full plan for an utterance, but instead plan it as they go. Futrell will present a theory of incremental language production based on a combination of information theory and control theory, where the choice to produce a particular word in context is determined by a policy that maximizes communicative reward subject to a channel capacity constraint on cognitive control. Futrell will show that the theory captures human data on errors in word choice, word order preferences based on the “accessibility” of words, and disfluencies.