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In an effort to ascertain whether the paucity of object clitics in L2 production documented in the extant research may reflect comprehension difficulties, this article reports on the use of a dictogloss task to determine the degree to which intermediate-level L2 learners of French ( N = 110) were able to process and reproduce the meaning of the clitics y and en . An analysis of the reconstructed texts revealed the presence of competing interlanguage forms. Overall, deleted objects, strong pronouns, and lexical noun phrases were used with greater frequency than the target forms. Errors related to animacy, argument structure, and referent constituted the primary source of non-target-like usage. Given the learners' frequent use of animate forms in lieu of y and en , it is suggested that teachers might do well to provide explicit instruction on the animacy distinction in prescriptive French. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]