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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. 

This paper discusses the relationship between monitoring, control, conscious awareness, and attention in language production. Instead of focusing on a speci昀椀c theory, I will examine these relationships within a framework that accommodates multiple (complementary) monitoring views, and discuss key differences between situations where competition is resolved internally vs. those that recruit external control. The takeaway message is that production performance is optimized by self-regulating monitoring-control loops, which operate largely subconsciously, but conscious awareness can be —and often is— triggered by the monitor. When triggered, in conjunction with the control system, such awareness can lead to attentional control of both the primary production process, as well as the monitoring process. I will also touch upon the repair process and its relation to these issues, and end by discussing some of the open questions as possible avenues for future research. 

Word production is the process of turning a thought into motor movements that produce a spoken word. This process has traditionally been studied using two approaches — the psycholinguistic approach and the motor speech approach — that focus on dierent stages of the production process. In this Perspective, I highlight the strengths of these two approaches and merge them with broader frameworks and theories of action and cognition to open new directions for language production research. I discuss proposed models for how speakers assess whether production is going smoothly (monitoring), adjust to diculties (control) and x errors (repair). Each proposal combines language production research with insights from other areas of cognition to demonstrate the utility and necessity of a closer integration of broader cognitive frameworks into models of word production.