A study examined acquisition of new vocabulary through oral stories in first-, third-, and fifth-grade children. Each subject heard four stories, each including four nonsense words repeated three times. These novel words represented common nouns whose meanings could be derived from propositional information associated with their occurrence. The two factors of particular interest were the proximity of the novel word recurrences and the specificity of the propositional information surrounding them. The subjects' phonological production of the novel words, cued production with sentence context provided, and comprehension of word meaning by propositional recall, were analyzed. Producing the phonological word form and associating it with the correct proposition was difficult for all subjects, especially the younger ones. Comprehension and phonological production task results revealed that specificity and proximity had differential effects on novel word acquisition dependent on the type of information to be acquired and recalled; these results support the idea that the listener processes various aspects of the novel word and its meaning differently, depending on the propositional context available. This method of fast mapping of novel words in story context was found to be a flexible and useful paradigm for examining fast mapping skills across a wide developmental range. (MSE)