Studies on child language acquisition suggest that Japanese children begin to use a variety of linguistic signs very early. However, even if young Japanese children learned the social pragmatic functions and interactional dimensions of such linguistic means and communicative devices, they might not have acquired the subtleties of those devices that is expected in telling oral personal narratives, such as the effective use of proper verb-ending forms to encode the narrator's perspective. A total of 20 middle-class Japanese preschool children participated in this study along with their mothers; their oral personal narratives were studied in order to analyze what kinds of linguistic means and rhetorical devices they deployed in narrative. The findings seemed to indicate that cognitive, linguistic, conversational, and social-interactional dimensions take different courses in the process of language acquisition, but that, at the same time, these factors interact in a complex fashion in narrative development. In telling personal narratives, preschoolers have not yet mastered certain linguistic devices and manipulative strategies so that they are capable of effectively encoding their perspectives as well as their emotions. Unlike talking about the here-and-now, in the development of narrative skills preschoolers have a long way to go. Telling a narrative on their own does not seem to be an easy task for young children. (Contains 29 references.) (Author)