Sixty four college students participated in a study which sought to validate a set of predictions about story memory, derived from a story-grammar approach to comprehension. The grammar describes the higher-order structures regulating the organization and retrieval of incoming story information. These structures, defined by a basic set of rewrite rules, specify the types of information which should occur in stories and the types of logical relations which should connect story components. Recall and reconstruction tasks were administered, based on sets of well-formed, slightly disordered, and randomly ordered stories and on unrelated statements. Results of the study indicated that higher-order story structures exerted a significant influence over the accuracy of story memory and had a pronounced effect on the reorganization of stories not conforming to the story grammar. Implications of the deliberate use of these story structures in retaining incoming information were illustrated. (Author/AA)