This study explored the relative strength of relationships between text, child, adult reader, and mode of story reading style in contributing to comprehension and memory in young children. Specifically, the study asked: What is the correlational relationship between the four vertices of a tetrahedral model of understanding and memory in children's story book recall? Further, what are the educational implications of the relationships? Five-year-olds were read stories using three different modes of adult-child interaction. The control condition involved an adult simply reading the story; the questioning condition involved the adult stopping periodically during reading to ask the child questions; and the co-construction condition involved interaction between the adult reader and child. Children were then asked to retell the story. Findings show that while the interaction during co-construction was not significantly correlated with story recall, the interaction between adult and child seemed to facilitate the children's memory for the specific episodic content of the story. The relationship between recall and text is progressively stronger based on the amount of social interaction with an adult. (EV)