A study examined prereaders' story processing strategies by assessing their performance on tasks that tapped their ability to (1) use story grammar and role playing, (2) retell a wordless picture book, (3) read a predictable book, (4) retell an oral story, (5) sequence pictured story events, and (6) fingerpoint-read a nursery rhyme. Parent interview data were also used to indicate experiential background with stories. Results indicated that prereaders' story processing strategies varied according to age, task format, print awareness, and home reading experiences. While older subjects tended to perform better on some tasks such as syntactic recall, picture sequencing, and fingerpointing, there were no significant differences in tasks involving story elements and role taking, main idea, reasoning, predicting, projecting, linking with prior experiences, semantic recall, line sequencing, or word recognition. The findings also indicated that children with a well-developed sense of story employed more successful strategies on other tasks regardless of their pictorial or nonpictorial format. While the results of a print awareness task indicated that the ability to map speech to print was correlated with age, it was more strongly related to a composite of three story processing tasks: sequencing story events, using semantic information, and projecting story events. It was also apparent that particular aspects of the home reading experience had a more significant impact on the development of certain story strategies than others. These included the number of people available to read to the child, the rereading of favorite story books, and the discussion of story books after the child's assumption of the role of reader through sharing books with younger siblings/children. (FL)