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The results of a recently completed research project into the retention of receptive skills in French by students and ex-students of the highest type of Dutch secondary education, VWO, showed that these skills hardly decrease during a period of four years after course completion. The fact that vocabulary would not suffer from such a period of non-use was particularly surprising. As part of this investigation a lexical decision experiment was carried out with two of the six groups involved in the main project. This experiment showed that taking decisions on the (il)legitimacy of French words takes more time already after two years after course completion, especially with respect to low-frequency non-cognates. The results of the main project are evaluated in the light of these findings. In addition, implications of these findings are discussed as they have been incorporated in further research.

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