The paper starts from the presentation of facts about the development of speech by different scientists. Reflecting on the development of speech serves us so that we can set basic assumptions about children's speech, language and storytelling abilities. Considering that speech, according to Velička (2014), is the basis of human communication and is important for the entire development of the child, knowledge of its development is extremely important for understanding and encouraging speech. According to Aladrović Sovaček (2019) Kovačević (1996), researchers linguists, psycholinguists and sociolinguists preoccupied with the issue of language acquisition and thus developed several theories that can be divided into: experiential (empiricist), innate (nativist) and cognitive (cognitive). Different stages of children's speech and language development are also described in the paper. One of the principles that a child should master, according to Gabaj and Kuvač Kraljević (2019), is appropriate labeling and maintenance of characters in the story in order to ensure effective communication with the audience through structured discourse. The main goal of the work was to investigate the storytelling abilities of younger kindergarten age children in a kindergarten in Zagreb. The research was conducted with the help of the Multilingual Narrative Assessment Instrument (MAIN), which is used to assess the narrative skills of children acquiring one or more languages and assesses story comprehension and production. In this research, the investigation was conducted according to the story model. The first goal of the research was to examine the structural complexity in the storytelling of children of younger kindergarten age. The second goal of the work was to examine the structural complexity in terms of understanding the goal, attempts and outcomes, and to compare the results of the first and second goals. The third research aimed to examine the understanding of the inner states of the characters in the story. The fourth aim was to examine the understanding of the content after the story was told. The final goal was to examine children's semantic fluency by listing animals, body parts and feelings. The research showed that there is a statistically significant difference only when examining semantic fluency in the area of naming body parts.