What term describes misperceiving or misremembering a word as having a similar meaning, such as lamp for light?

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When the intended word is replaced by another with a related meaning, this is a semantic substitution error. Saying “lamp” instead of “light” shows that the meaning network activated a semantically related item, producing a word that fits conceptually but is not the target. In clinical terms this is called semantic paraphasia, a type of paraphasia where the replacement word is related in meaning to the intended one. This reflects how semantically linked concepts compete during word retrieval and explains why the substitute is so close in sense to the target. Other labels are less precise for this pattern: lexical confusion focuses more on form or mix-ups of actual words, a word association error describes a different cognitive task issue, and semantic drift refers to gradual changes in meaning over time rather than a single misproduction. The precise, widely used label for this phenomenon is semantic paraphasia.