This is a study of linguistic variability among social levels in West Germany and of the problems associated with doing such an analysis. The data, ordered according to sex and social levels, were collected from young children retelling narratives heard on tapes. The report represents a comprehensive study of the children's syntactic performance and language usage. The discussion is within the transformational-generative framework and the classification of the syntactic patterns is based essentially on Chomsky. There are five chapters: (1) introduction to the investigation; (2) discussion of the adequacy of generative grammar and the assumptions taken by such a model in describing and interpreting linguistic phenomena; (3) description of the methodology used for collecting the data and for its analysis; (4) presentation of the results of the study, which are subsequently tabulated in the appendix; and (5) discussion of language usage forms resulting from socially induced behavior strategies specific to social levels--Bernstein's concept of verbal planning. (TL)