In this chapter, we present the results of 'first exposure' comprehension tasks in which we investigate the strategies used by French NSs when confronted for the first time with written or spoken words in an unknown language, Polish in this case. The term 'strategy' here refers to the way our informants proceed, in the absence of pertinent knowledge about Polish, when asked to perform a task in Polish. The general question that guides this chapter is the following: what knowledge is brought to the L2 acquisitional process from the very beginning and how is this knowledge applied at the moment of initial processing of foreign language input? More specifically, we pose the question: what knowledge sources help the learner associate a meaning to a word presented out of context? In other words, how will a learner go about finding a signifié for a decontextualised signifiant ? The results presented in this chapter provide insights into whether or not the L1 alone serves as the basis for L2 acquisition, leading us to extend our investigation to the role played by learners' other L2s in this process. What if a learner has knowledge of another language, such as Italian, German or Russian? Would this knowledge help the learner process the new Polish words?

We administered word translation tests to two groups of 'first exposure' informants (see Appendix 1 for test items). Participants of one group took the written form of the test in which they were asked to translate the words they read into French; members of the other group took the oral form in which they were asked to translate the words they heard into French. In the oral test condition, informants were given 3 seconds between each word to respond. Unless signalled otherwise, we performed group analyses of the data (i.e. written and oral data combined).