UC Berkeley L2 Journal Title L2 French Learners’ Processing of Object Clitics: Data from the Classroom Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5v37r73q Journal L2 Journal, 2(1) Author Wust, Valerie Publication Date 2010 DOI 10.5070/L2219061 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California L2 Journal, Volume 2 (2010), pp. 45-72. http://repositories.cdlib.org/uccllt/l2/vol2/iss1/art2/ L2 French Learners’ Processing of Object Clitics: Data from the Classroom VALERIE WUST North Carolina State University at Raleigh E-mail:
[email protected] 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.