A total of 108 children, aged between 8-17 years old, (M= 13; DP= 2,7), learners of Portuguese as a L2, belonging to six groups – Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Portuguese-speaking African countries (Países Africanos de Língua Oficial Portuguesa - PALOPs), Latin America, Asia and China - were compared regarding three verbal tasks on verbal reasoning and vocabulary skills. Tasks on semantic association, morphological extraction and vocabulary match were administered to examine nationality group effects on task performance and language proficiency. This study aims to verify whether students from different nationalities and learners of Portuguese as L2 evidence similar difficulty levels in tests on language skills. It is expected that students whose country of origin and culture is further from the Portuguese and European contexts perform poorer in all tests when compared to students who were born in countries geographically and culturally closer to the referred contexts. Results of MANOVA showed that nationality groups differed in a significant manner, in particular, two groups – from South Asia (Meridional) and from Latin America - whose performance was different in all tests. The Asian group evidenced more difficulty in vocabulary decoding and verbal reasoning when compared to other nationality groups. Higher scores were attained by the Latin American group whose language of testing had common features with the home language and therefore showed more overlapping. The influence of the co-variable \"Languages spoken at home\" on the results was also confirmed, which suggests that nationality is a less strong predictor compared to the number of languages spoken at home in regards to performance in Portuguese L2. Linear regression analyses revealed that the most predictive model includes the referred variable, which influences performance in all tasks. Results will be discussed from the point of view of individualized assessment and intervention according to immigrant school groups in European contexts.