Narration is a complex language skill that requires coordination of multiple aspects of language production. As such, it provides a large number of important information about language and pragmatic skills. One of these skills is referring; marking differe nt characters in stories. When it comes to referring, three reference functions can be distinguished introduction, maintenance and reintroduction of characters. The goal of this study was to determine whether there are age differences in appropriate character reference with regard to the three referen ce functions and thus to investigate the development of narrative skills in Croatian language. Three groups of subjects were included in the research 30 six year olds, 30 eight year olds and 30 ten year olds. Children’s narratives that were analysed were collected with pic ture materials from the Croatian version of MAIN; Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives. The proportions of inappropriate references and the most frequently used linguistic devices for a particular function were calculated. The results show that the referencing of all three age groups in the Croatian lang uage is similar. Children make relatively few mistakes when referring to characters, which indicates mastery of this skill. The descriptive results show differences between individual functions. While all three age groups are successful in the introduction and maintenance functions, developmental tendencies were found in the reintroduction function; the proportion of inappropriate references decreases with increasing age. It is interesting to note that, with increasing age, more children use the indefinite form of the noun when introducing characters to indicate new information, which is not obligatory in the Croatian language. This research provides information about the development of reference skills in the Croatian language, a subject that is still insuf ficiently researched, while simultaneously pointing out some cross linguistic differences. At the same time, it has important implications on speech and language pathology practice, the key part of which is the assessment of narrative abilities.