In Chapter 5, we established that grammatical analysis on word classes and inflexion is already at work upon first exposure to a new target language. In this chapter we pursue our examination of grammatical analysis – word order and verbal morphology in particular – by studying the data collected from our eight monolingual French native speakers over the first 8 hours of exposure to Polish, as well as data collected from all of our learners present during the first 1h30 of Polish instruction (n = 19).

We used three written tests to collect data on our learners' processing of grammatical information: a word order test, a grammaticality judgement test and a written translation of the grammaticality judgement test (see appendixes for test items). Different versions of the three test-types were administered at Periods 1h30, 3h30 and 7h00. During the word order tests, learners were given a context sentence in Polish followed by a sentence in which the Polish words were scrambled. They were asked to put the words in the appropriate order. The word order tests were designed to investigate our learners' processing of the following phenomena:

• the order of basic sentence constituents (SVO, OVS, etc.);

• the position of the Polish negator nie relative to its verb; and

• the position of the Polish reflexive pronoun się relative to its verb.

The grammaticality judgement tests consist of short written texts containing a variety of basic constituent word orders in which errors of verbal morphology appear. We asked learners to read the text and make corrections if necessary. Results of these tests will be discussed in the sections on basic constituent word order and verbal morphology. After completing the grammaticality judgement tests, the learners were immediately asked to translate the short text into French.