Le développement de la richesse lexicale en langue de scolarisation et en langue d'origine

This paper compares short narrative and argumentative texts written by migrant Portuguese-speaking children in Switzerland to those written by Portuguese-speaking children living in Portugal as well as French-speaking and German-speaking children in Switzerland. This contribution focuses on human intuitive perception of the richness of vocabulary. Our corpus comprises of 3,060 French, German and Portuguese texts written by children aged 8 to 10 at three different time points. The texts were assessed online by 574 untrained adult French, German and Portuguese native speakers. Results of these ratings were modelled by group of children, time of data collection and type of text. The analysis revealed that the scores for each group increased between the first and third time point. Portuguese children in Switzerland tend to score lower than children in the other comparison groups, but the size and probability of these differences differed according to the language, the time when the data were collected, and the type of text. Potential didactic implications of the results are discussed.