The purpose of this study was to assess whether the well-documented paucity of object clitics in L2 French production reflects difficulties learners have comprehending these forms in classroom input. To this end, an aural French-English translation task was used to determine the extent to which university-level L2 learners of French (N=152) were able to process and encode the meaning of the object clitics me, te, la, l', les, lui, leur, y and en. An analysis of the translations revealed variation in performance across clitic types (19-75% accuracy) and as a function of learners' proficiency level and educational background. There was a positive relationship between L2 proficiency and clitic processing. Post-French immersion learners were better able to process and encode clitics than their post-core French peers. As a group, the learners were only 54% accurate, with their mistranslations of object clitics indicating incomplete use of gender, number, animacy and case markings to link these forms to their co-referents. An under-reliance on animacy and agreement cues by these L2 learners suggests the need for explicit instruction on the importance of syntactic and discourse-pragmatic information in clitic comprehension.
In an effort to ascertain whether the paucity of object clitics in L2 production documented in the extant research may reflect comprehension difficulties, this article reports on the use of a dictogloss task to determine the degree to which intermediate-level L2 learners of French (N ¼ 110) were able to process and reproduce the meaning of the clitics y and en. An analysis of the reconstructed texts revealed the presence of competing interlanguage forms. Overall, deleted objects, strong pronouns, and lexical noun phrases were used with greater frequency than the target forms. Errors related to animacy, argument structure, and referent constituted the primary source of non-targetlike usage. Given the learners' frequent use of animate forms in lieu of y and en, it is suggested that teachers might do well to provide explicit instruction on the animacy distinction in prescriptive French.
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