Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Active production helps L1 and L2 learners to notice linguistic generalisations better than passive learning does. Here, we explore whether a production task encourages learners to identify less obvious generalisations when more than one analysis is possible. We taught participants an artificial language compatible with two grammatical analyses: one that marks semantic roles using word order, the other using case suffixes. After training, half of the participants did a comprehension task, and the other half did a production task. We predicted that the comprehension group would adopt the English-like word order analysis, while the production group would be more likely to learn the recurring case suffixes and thus adopt the alternative analysis. Although this prediction was not supported, exploratory analysis suggests that production did increase participants' certainty about their chosen analysis. We suspect that participants arrived at the familiar word order analysis first and then did not consider alternative hypotheses.