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Native adult speakers of a language can produce grammatical sentences fluently, effortlessly, and with relatively few errors. These characteristics make the highly-practiced task of speaking a viable candidate for an automatic process, i.e., one independent of cognitive control. However, recent studies have suggested that some aspects of production, such as lexical retrieval and tailoring speech to an addressee, may depend on the speaker’s inhibitory control abilities. Less clear is the dependence of syntactic operations on inhibitory control processes. Using both a direct manipulation of inhibitory control demands and an analysis of individual differences, we show that one of the most common syntactic operations, producing the correct subject-verb agreement, requires inhibitory control when a singular subject noun competes with a plural local noun as in “The snake next to the purple elephants is green.”. This finding calls for the integration of inhibitory control mechanisms into models of agreement production, and more generally into theories of syntactic production. 

In his seminal essay, “The Modularity of Mind” Fodor (1983), presents arguments in favor of language comprehension as a special module along with other input processing systems. His view on language production is less clear. In this chapter, I first demonstrate that language production and comprehension are quite similar when evaluated in light of Fodor's criteria for modules: both meet a subset of those criteria in that their behavior resembles automatic processing; neither, however, is informationally encapsulated. This partial conformity with the criteria for specialized modules, leaves the question “How special is language production?” unanswered. I will then propose that this question can be answered by re-examining the origin of what resembles the behavior of an automatic system. I will argue that language production is, in fact, an efficiently monitored and controlled system, and that such monitoring and control mechanisms are shared between language production and other systems. These domain-general mechanisms, however, operate on domain-specific representations, creating specialized monitoring-control loops that can be selectively trained and selectively damaged. 

Language research has provided insight into how speakers translate a thought into a sequence of sounds that ultimately becomes words, phrases, and sentences. Despite the complex stages involved in this process, relatively little is known about how we avoid and handle production and comprehension errors that would otherwise impede communication. We review current research on the mechanisms underlying monitoring and control of the language system, especially production, with particular emphasis on whether such monitoring is issued by domain-general or domain-specific procedures.