The authors, with collaborators from several countries, explore uses of linguistic forms in narrative, in both a developmental and crosslinguistic framework. Contributors are psychologists and linguists, taking a functional typological approach. The study is based on a large crosslinguistic corpus of narratives, all elicited by the same picture storybook, in English, German, Spanish, Hebrew, and Turkish, from preschool and school-age children, as well as adults. The findings deal with both universal and language-specific patterns of development, suggesting a new approach to questions of language and thought.