When people describe visually presented scenes, they gaze at each object for approximately one second before referring to it. The time spent gazing at an object reflects the difficulty of selecting and retrieving a name for it. Speakers even look at the objects that they intend to talk about for a second before they make speech errors (e.g., accidentally calling an axe "a hammer") and before they intentionally use inaccurate names to describe objects (e.g., deliberately calling a dog "a cat"). These results and others indicate that speakers' eye movements reflect the time course of generating spoken language and that speakers tend to minimize the delay between preparing words and saying them while simultaneously attempting to avoid disfluencies.