This study aimed to characterize the linguistic difficulties of students with sociocultural deprivation, as well as those of children with language disorders in order to provide appropriate educational care. To do this, we compared performance in various syntactic measures in three groups of children aged between 7 years and 6 months and 9 years [control group, n = 33; deprived group, n = 34; specific language impairment (SLI) group, n = 27]. The children responded to a set of syntactic measures designed for this research project. The results showed differences between the control group and the deprivation group in measures involving functional integration of words and requiring greater metalinguistic composition. These differences were not confirmed when the measures consisted only of producing syntactic structures from meaningful words or phrases. In contrast, significant differences were confirmed between the control group and the SLI group on all measures. When the SLI and the social deprivation group were compared, the greatest difference were found in the production of syntactic structures based on phrases. We discuss the greater influence of social and environmental factors on some syntactic measures than on others, and the specific difficulties of children with SLI, not only in performing tasks of language production, but also in those requiring greater planning of language structures.