Sentences produced by children and adults in telling stories are analyzed, with particular emphasis on developmental trends in sentence length, the degree of cohesion between clauses, and the internal coherence of sentence content. Subjects for the study were 10 adults and 60 Japanese children in six different age groups. Each subject was interviewed individually by two women, one eliciting the narratives and the other serving as listener. Two types of material were used to elicit narratives: a set of picture cartoons depicting short stories, and a seven-minute videotape, which was a segment from a popular television series. In general, the task that required telling the story depicted by the cartoons proved easier than narrating the video segment from memory. Only seven of the children under five years of age were able to produce enough narration about the videotape to include their stories in the analysis. Two aspects of the findings are isolated for special comment: (1) the nature of the adult model for sentence formation and variations in consistency used in marking narrative units with sentence boundaries, and the use of conjunctions; and (2) the way in which the development of sentences in narratives by children mirrors the acquisition of sentences in conversation at an earlier stage of language development. (Author/AMH)