The acquisition of paraphrastic mastery is conspicuous by its absence in surveys in the field of research on the acquisition of the mother tongue, a skill that is indispensable for the child around the age of 4 years who is still a long way from having achieved a mastery of her mother tongue. This article aims to show that these paraphrases, produced by children of a range of ages, tell us about the different stages of acquisition, assessed by the qualitative differences that can be described between a source statement and one that has been reformulated in its paraphrastic form. The study group consisted of 60 children (in groups of 15 aged 4, 6, 8 and 10 years) who asked to recount a story of 500 words immediately after having heard it told to them once. A representative sample of 13 simple (containing a single predicate) and complex phrases (containing two predicates) was selected from the source text and systematically compared to the full set of paraphrastic reformulations employed by all the children. The results of the linguistic analysis show that the paraphrastic capacity increases and becomes more diverse with age. Depending upon the type of complexity, either syntactic and / or semantic, the difficulty varies according to the source statement, but also on the basis of its potential for being paraphrased. Finally, the most important result demonstrates that paraphrastic reformulation procedures are encountered in the following order: descriptive paraphrases, then semantic, followed by transformational and, finally functional ones.