Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Errors are usually viewed as detrimental to learning. Yet, recent proposals suggest that errors may create desirable difficul-ties and thereby improve learning. We evaluated these proposals in the context of cross-situational word learning. Duringeach learning trial, adults saw two images and heard two words. In the Error1 condition, the first word was unexpectedbased on prior experience and the second was expected. The referent of the unexpected word could only be establishedafter hearing the expected word. In the Error2 condition, the expected word came first, which made it easier to learn themapping of the subsequent unexpected word. There was no difference between the conditions; however, expected wordswere only learned significantly better than unexpected words in the Error2 condition. This suggests that the structure ofthe learning environment modulates the impact of errors.