Producing during language learning affects comprehension
Elise Hopman and Maryellen MacDonald
To investigate the extent to which learning transfers from Production to Comprehension, we taught participants an artificial language containing multiple dependencies. Participants were randomly assigned to either a Production or a Comprehension learning condition, with conditions designed to balance attention demands and other known production-comprehension differences’the Production Effect and the Testing Effect. After training, Production participants outperformed Comprehension participants on vocabulary comprehension and also on tests of grammatical dependencies when covarying out vocabulary learning. These data show that production specifically benefits the learning of grammatical dependencies, informing theories of shared representations between comprehension and production processes.
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