Of Mouses and Mans: A Test of Errorless Versus Error-Based Learning in Children

Area of Science:

• Developmental Psychology
• Linguistics
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Error-based learning is beneficial in pedagogical settings for both adults and children.
• Its effectiveness in non-pedagogical settings, particularly for child language acquisition, remains under-explored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the efficacy of error-based learning versus errorless learning in young children's language acquisition.
• To examine the role of caregiver feedback in naturalistic language learning environments.

Main Methods:

• A corpus analysis of 227 child-caregiver interactions.
• Two preregistered experiments with 3- and 4-year-old children (N=56, N=99) comparing error-based and errorless learning conditions.
• Irregular plurals (e.g., 'mice') were used as the linguistic target.

Main Results:

• Caregiver feedback on errors was infrequent, offered limited information, and was rarely acted upon immediately by children.
• Error-based learning was not consistently effective and showed no superiority over errorless learning in the experiments.
• Children's immediate error correction was infrequent.

Conclusions:

• The benefits of error-based learning may not generalize from pedagogical to non-pedagogical settings for child language acquisition.
• The study identifies constraints influencing the effectiveness of different learning mechanisms.
• Errorless learning may be as effective, if not more so, than error-based learning in naturalistic language acquisition contexts.