A study was undertaken to evaluate the child's capacity to judge the acceptability of French interrogative utterances on three levels--familiar, standard, and educated. A second objective was to consider the resulting observations in the light of certain sociocultural parameters. The test, one that had been used for adults in French second language classes, was given to 340 children in the elementary schools of the canton of Neuchatel. The test itself was composed of 16 interrogative sentences acceptable on one or another level of spoken French. The hypotheses in the study had to do with: (1) the passage, during schooling, from the familiar level to the other levels; (2) causes of the evolution; (3) influence of traditional and/or progressive teaching methodology; (4) differences due to urban and rural environments; (5) influence of higher and lower economic levels; (6) influence of native language on students who were learning French as a second language; and (7) possible convergences among the previous six questions. The analysis, presented in three chapters, notes a progressive rejection of the familiar level, and a correlation between attitude toward different registers and the sociocultural parameters of class, native language, teaching method, and place of residence. (AMH)