Together with researchers Valérie Keppenne and Carrie Jackson from Penn State’s German department, LCNL’s Elise Hopman published an article today in Applied Psycholinguistics. The article presents an extensive follow-up to an earlier paper from our lab showing, in an artificial language, that production training improves grammar learning compared to comprehension training. Title and abstract are below, and you can read the full article here.
Production-based training benefits the comprehension and production of grammatical gender in L2 German
Abstract: Ongoing debate exists regarding the role of production-based versus comprehension-based training for L2 learning. However, recent research suggests an advantage for production training due to benefits stemming from the opportunity to compare generated output with feedback and from the memory mechanisms associated with language production. Based on recent findings with an artificial language paradigm, we investigated the effects of production-based and comprehension-based training for learning grammatical gender among beginning L2 German learners. Participants received production-based or comprehension-based training on grammatical gender assignment and gender agreement between determiners, adjectives, and 15 German nouns, followed by four tasks targeting the comprehension and production of the target nouns and their corresponding gender marking on determiners and adjectives. Both groups were equally accurate in compre- hending and producing the nouns. For tasks requiring knowledge of grammatical gender, the production-based group outperformed the comprehension-based group on both com- prehension and production tests. These findings demonstrate the importance of language production for creating robust linguistic representations and have important implications for classroom instruction.
