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In two experiments (N = 179), we studied the effects of contextual similarity and training mode on the comprehension of new vocabulary. Participants were trained on new vocabulary in blocks of semantically similar, phonologically similar, or unrelated items. Each participant was trained through passive exposure, active comprehension, or active production. Same number of items were trained in clusters of 9 in Experiment 1 and clusters of 3 in Experiment 2, manipulating difficulty during training. Results showed a detrimental and persistent effect of semantic similarity, and a less robust effect of phonological similarity, both of which grew larger over time. We also found a negative and largely independent influence of production mode on learning, which, contrary to the similarity effect, shrank with time. Neither effect was modulated by difficulty at training time. These findings shed further light on the factors influencing new vocabulary learning and open new avenues for larger-scale and classroom-level studies. 

Abstract For both adults and children, learning from one's mistakes (error‐based learning) has been shown to be advantageous over avoiding errors altogether (errorless learning) in pedagogical settings. However, it remains unclear whether this advantage carries over to nonpedagogical settings in children, who mostly learn language in such settings. Using irregular plurals (e.g., “mice”) as a test case, we conducted a corpus analysis (N= 227) and two preregistered experiments (N= 56,N= 99), to investigate the potency of error‐based learning as a mechanism for language acquisition in 3‐ and 4‐year‐old children. The results of the corpus analysis showed that incidental feedback after errors, in the form of caregivers’ reformulations of children's errors, was relatively infrequent, had modest informational value, and was rarely used by children to correct their errors immediately. The following two experiments contrasted error‐based learning with errorless learning, where the correct utterance was modeled for the child before a potential error was committed. The results showed that error‐based learning was not always effective, and when it was, it was certainly not superior to errorless learning. Collectively, these findings question the extension of the benefits of error‐based learning from pedagogical to nonpedagogical settings and define constraints under which one mechanism may be more beneficial to learning than the other.