Children's use of referential expressions is far from being firmly identified. The main objective of the study was to examine children's development between first and fifth grade in the use of referentialexpressions in oral and written narratives. We studied how children maintain and reintroduce animate entities by employing different linguistic forms, looking at the interactionbetween linguistic forms and functions. A second objective was to analyse a new context of use, written narrative, and compare it to the oral one. The third aim was to compare the development of referential expressions in children of two Romance languages, Italian and Catalan. Results show that first grade children are already able to master the distinction between maintenance and reintroduction functions. On the other hand, even fifth grade children are not fully aware of possible referential ambiguities. Whereas no significant differences in managing the referential system emerged between the two languages, a few differences were found between oral and written modes. However primary school children are in general more focused on the narrative genre than on the differences between the two modes.

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