This article presents a study of the use of the Dutch cardinal posture verbs staan (‘stand’), liggen (‘lie’) and zitten (‘sit’) by French-speaking learners of Dutch; the data is drawn from a corpus of semi-spontaneous oral picture descriptions. Due to the typological differences between French and Dutch in the spatial domain (see Talmy 2000; Lemmens & Slobin 2008), the use of posture verbs is a highly problematic subject for French-speaking learners of Dutch. As a result, their interlanguage is typically characterized by an overall underuse of posture verbs as well as a confusion of the different posture verbs. Our study evaluates how the use of the posture verbs by the learners aligns with their level of proficiency. Strikingly, the statistical tendencies in our data show that a higher proficiency does not correspond to a more accurate use of posture verbs. At first sight, this seems to suggest that advanced learners have become worse at the use of posture verbs. A more refined analysis, however, shows that despite the increase of errors, the learners adopt more native-like strategies as their level of foreign language proficiency increases, suggesting that they gradually become more aware of the strong locative character of Dutch. ; Cet article présente une étude de l’utilisation des verbes de posture cardinaux du néerlandais staan (‘être debout’), liggen (‘être allongé’) et zitten (‘être assis’) par des apprenants francophones. Nos données sont tirées d’un corpus de descriptions semi-spontanées d’images à l’oral. En raison des différences typologiques entre le français et le néerlandais dans le domaine spatial (cf. Talmy 2000; Lemmens & Slobin 2008), l’usage des verbes de posture est un sujet particulièrement problématique pour les apprenants francophones du néerlandais. De ce fait, leur interlangue présente typiquement une sous-utilisation générale des verbes de posture ainsi qu’une confusion entre ces différents verbes. Notre étude évalue dans quelle mesure l’usage des verbes de posture par les ...