To address the notion that the cognitive level of young children influences their ability to recall the logical sequence found in stories, four modes of language--story generation, retelling, dictation, and writing--were collected for three weeks from 35 second grade children. Through prior testing with the Goldschmid-Bentler Concept Assessment Kit-Conservation-Form A, children were classed as preoperational (nonconservers) or concrete operational (conservers). The story generation task addressed the issue of the preoperational child's ability to comprehend sequential order in stories and the retelling task measured the preoperational child's ability to remember stories in sequential order. Each of the stories was analyzed according to seven measures of linguistic quantity or language output. Findings indicated conservers, with regard to linguistic quantity measures, used a greater total number of words and total number of dependent clauses than did nonconservers in the four story-language modes combined. With regard to rhetorical quality measures, conservers used the macrostructure categories of initiating event and reaction at a statistically significant level as compared to nonconservers. (HOD)