Generalizing beyond the input: The functions of the constructions matter

•Artificial language learning experiment with pragmatically contrasting constructions.•Learners are less lexically conservative than with undifferentiated constructions.•They tend to use the contextually appropriate construction.•They do even more so if they have witnessed alternating verbs.•Construction learning involves an interaction between function and frequency. A growing emphasis on statistics in language learning raises the question of whether and when speakers use language in ways that go beyond the statistical regularities in the input. In this study, two groups were exposed to six novel verbs and two novel word order constructions that differed in function: one construction but not the other was exclusively used with pronoun undergoers. The distributional structure of the input was manipulated between groups according to whether each verb was used exclusively in one or the other construction (the lexicalist condition), or whether a minority of verbs was witnessed in both constructions (the alternating condition). Production and judgments results demonstrate that participants tended to generalize the constructions for use in appropriate discourse contexts, ignoring evidence of verb-specific behavior, especially in the alternating condition. Our results suggest that construction learning involves an interaction of witnessed usage together with the functions of the constructions involved.