1. a cognitive test in which the participant is required to generate as many items as possible that adhere to specified criteria. Production tasks may take a variety of different forms. For example, in a word-production task, individuals may be asked to list as many exemplars from a given subject category (e.g., flower names) as possible, whereas in a sentence-production task, individuals may be asked to create as many unique sentences as possible that contain certain elements (e.g., a transitive verb, a noun, and a target stimulus word). 2. any test of linguistic development in which the participant is required to speak or write rather than to demonstrate understanding of material spoken or written by others. For example, in an experiment assessing foreign-language acquisition, native-English speakers studying German might be asked to read aloud a series of German sentences.