This study investigated the developmental acquisition of cognitive structures, which influence the encoding and retrieval of story information. Examined were the between and within group differences among young children in the acquisition of story schema and in the processing of story information. A series of four experimental tasks were administered individually at the start of the academic year and again at the end to each of the 156 four, five, six and seven year olds in the sample. Tasks chosen were selected on the basis of research suggesting their viability as measures of schema acquisition and related processing. Specifically, they assessed: metacognitive knowledge of story structure; detection of structural deviation; recognition and retrieval of missing information; and inferring between and within episodic relationships. In a fifth task, first and second graders wrote two stories in the spring of the year based on picture stimuli. In addition, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test was administered to each subject in the fall of the year. The first two hypotheses predicted significant between group differences at the fall administration of the tasks and significant within group gains over the course of the year. In general, findings supported these hypotheses (p <.05). The third hypothesis predicted that fall performance on tasks one through four would account for a significant amount of the variance in reading growth over the year. This hypothesis was supported for the first graders relative to tasks one, two, and three (p<.10). For these subjects, level of structural complexity present in written stories was significantly different for good versus poor readers (p<.05). For second grade subjects, performance on task four was shown to contribute a significant amount of the variance in reading growth (p<.07). In general, correlations between performance on the tasks and IQ were low. Findings from task one suggest that young children acquire the concept of a story in the same developmental manner that other concepts and knowledge structures are believed to be acquired. Children's performance on the experimental tasks two, three and four suggest age related differences in monitoring, recognition, reconstruction and retrieval operations on story information. However, improvement in the ability to deal with story information does not appear to be attributable to the developmental acquisition of schemata but rather to its increased accessibility, engagement, and efficiency as a processing and production mechanism. / Ed. D.