Age-related improvement of mnemonic performances of children has attracted many investigators wishing to determine developmental mechanisms which might produce this improvement. Potential explanations have been subsumed under three major categories: capacity, strategies, and knowledge structures. The present investigation, in focusing on children's knowledge structures, helps to reveal interactions of inferred structures with various word-processing tasks, and to find possible developmental patterns among these interactions in the years before formal schooling. Ninety-six children attending suburban preschools were selected in equal numbers of boys and girls at ages 3, 4, and 5 years. Within age-gender groups, subjects were randomly assigned to the eight treatment combinations of two word lists and four processing tasks. The tasks were answering autographical questions about the word (i.e., to relate a target word to personal episodes or events in long-term storage), pointing to the category of the word, hearing the words embedded in a story, or repeating the word five times. The list contained three words in each of four categories. Each subject heard and repeated the twelve words, processed them in the assigned manner and, after a brief distractor task, was given tests of free recall, cued recall, and recognition. Results are discussed. (Author/RH)