Our study of initial processing of foreign language input began with an overview of how various theories, models and frameworks of second language acquisition attempt to explain a learner's processing of target language input, and how the terms 'input' and 'intake' are characterised and defined. In addition, we looked at what these diverse perspectives have to say about the initial stages of L2 acquisition and found that few say much about it. In Chapter 2 we examined the few studies that have investigated L2 acquisition upon first exposure to the L2 and argued the need for further studies of this kind. We then entered into the details of the current study, examining differences between the learners' NL (French) and TL (Polish) in Chapter 3, identifying potential 'difficulties' that could be predicted. We introduced and described the study's participants and data collection procedures in Chapter 4. Here the reader came to understand the nature of our learners/informants, that of French university students who share French as their NL, and who have learned about French during their many years of French schooling. The reader also came to understand the highly metalinguistic nature of the tasks that our participants were asked to perform. In sum, we emphasised that the institutional education and academic level of our participants, as well as the highly metalinguistic nature of our tasks, needed to be taken into consideration when interpreting and discussing results. We also set out in this study to completely control the TL input provided to the learners. In Chapter 4, we described how this was done. We also attempted to identify the knowledge available to learners before exposure to the TL and the strategies used by the learners upon first exposure to the TL input. We responded to this objective in Chapter 5 with a characterisation of the state of an adult native French speaker when first exposed to Polish input.