An Update on Monitoring, Control, and Repair in Language Production

Word production has traditionally been studied within two approaches, the psycholinguistic approach and the motor speech approach. In this paper, I will focus on how combining the strengths of these two approaches, as well as merging them with broader frameworks and theories of action and cognition, can guide language production research in novel directions. I will specifically focus on the three processes of monitoring, control, and error repair, which benefit most from interdisciplinary approaches. For monitoring, I will endorse a multi-process monitoring view with different roles for perceptual loop, forward models, and conflict monitoring. For control, I will argue for the learning view of cognitive control, which predicts domain-specificity in the application of control despite domain-generality in neural correlates of control. For repair, I will propose a new model, which combines the basic processes of psycholinguistic models with notions of post-selection processing and conflict-based monitoring and control, to arrive at an adaptive model of repairs in language production. Through these three specific proposals, I will demonstrate the necessity of a closer integration of learning and decision-making frameworks into models of word production, as an important general direction for future research.