| Summary: | The authors studied the oral and written language level of children attending the fourth year of Primary school in Castilian, Catalan, French, Italian and Portuguese. With this purpose in mind, they collected, for each language, the narratives (oral and written) of 60 children belonging to whole classes and constituting representative samples, in Barcelona, Paris, Turin and Porto. For each language, they compared the mean number of words, the syntactic structures (complete sentences and descriptive presentations), the terms (syntagmatic groups) linked to the main verb of the structures and the vocabulary (grammatical and lexical words) used. It was thus possible to establish a dictionary of the different lexical words used in connection with the proposed topics. In general, the "language situation" is, on average, of the same type. Such a detailed study shows the similarities and differences peculiar to each language and underlines the possibility of learning languages, which are very similar. Moreover the scores obtained allow us to compare the levei of a child with the mean scores corresponding to his/her class and to deduce, if necessary, what can be done to improve his/her language ability.
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