The Roles of L1 Transfer and Processing Limitations in the L2 Acquisition of French Object Clitic Constructions: Evidence from Chinese- and Spanish-speaking Learners

Object clitic constructions (1a) are notoriously difficult to master for learners of French, especially second language (L2) learners (e.g., Adiv 1984, Herschensohn 2004). This raises the question of what type of forms learners use in contexts typically requiring object clitics. Such contexts are ones in which the referent of the object is salient in the discourse and thus is felicitously encoded as a pronoun. In French this is realized as a preverbal clitic (1a). Previous work suggests that learners typically resort to one of two options: they either use a postverbal lexical DP, as in (1b), or they omit the object altogether (1c). (1b), while grammatically correct, is infelicitous in a context where the object represents given information, as in (1). (1c), by contrast, is considered ungrammatical in standard French.