Recently there has been an increasing interest in the development of children's impressions of stories, partially due to the work of theorists who have proposed formal grammars representing structural characteristics of stories. In order to learn more about children's narrative competence, stories they produced were analyzed in three experiments. The pictorial sequences from the picture arrangement subtest of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R) were used as a structural context to elicit stories from the subjects. These were also used to constrain the pragmatic and imaginative aspects of the story telling task so that particular structural aspects could be examined uniformly across different age groups, and to provide a first step in assessment of the underlying psychological properties related to successful performance. In experiments one and two, 12 students each from second and seventh grade and 12 college students were given the subtest individually and were asked to produce an oral story. In the third experiment, 12 seventh graders and twelve college students were administered the subtest and were asked to produce a written story. Overall, the findings indicated that (1) children dwell on overt characteristics of events, avoid discussion of character motivation, and ignore logical connectivity, while adults embellished these--particularly in the written stories; (2) the inclusion of a goal statement was much higher than the inclusion of a reaction statement for all subjects; and (3) the event structures of the WISC-R picture sets vary considerably. (A sample picture arrangement task and two versions of a corresponding story are appended.) (CRH)