The present study investigates the acquisition of grammatical collocations of infinitival and gerundive constructions of the retrospective verbs: remember, forget, and regret by intermediate Egyptian EFL students.  These verbs signal different meanings with different patterns, i.e., verb + to-infinitive and verb + verb-ing.  The current study explores both comprehension and production data.  The study tests the efficiency of applying the cognitive and traditional approaches to the acquisition of the target constructions.  The researcher randomly assigned the participants to three groups: (1) a cognitive group; (2) a traditional group; and (3) a control group.  The three groups took part in pre- and posttests.  The tasks employed were: (1) a blank-filling task; (2) a picture description task; (3) a picture-based grammaticality judgment (GJ) task; and (4) a sentence-based GJ task.  Results of the study revealed that: (1) Participants in the cognitive group outperformed their peers in the traditional and control groups; (2) performance on the comprehension tasks was higher than that on the production tasks across the three groups; (3) participants in the cognitive group obtained higher production scores – compared to comprehension scores – than participants in the two other groups did.  The results are in line with previous research: Implementing the tenets of the cognitive linguistics approach in presenting input to L2 learners facilitates the acquisition of the target constructions than both the traditional exposure to input and incidental learning (typical of the traditional and control groups respectively).