A study was conducted to determine the role of story grammar in children's ability to detect misplaced information in simple narratives. The subjects, 27 second grade and 25 fifth grade students, each read six stories that had been developed for the study. The stories were one-episode narratives comprised of six grammatical categories with two propositions per category. The six categories were setting, initiating event, internal response, attempt, consequence, and reaction. Six event sequence orders were used in the stories, five representing either the movement of the internal response or the consequences, and the sixth representing the correct event ordering. After reading a story, each student was asked to answer a series of probe questions about it to discover how readily he or she had noticed the order violations. After answering the questions, the student was asked to construct a better story using the same sentences. The results indicated that children judged correctly ordered stories to be "well-formed" and "sensible," but frequently identified disordered stories as being "flawed." Developmental differences were found in the children's ability to use expectations for the sequence of a story, in determining when the story made sense, and in correctly reordering it. (FL)