Storytelling is an important social skill that depends on our linguistic, pragmatic and cognitive abilities The analysis of narratives involves the evaluation of various linguistic features, including the macrostructure and microstructure of the narrative . The key elements of macrostructure are internal state words . Internal state words are influenced by many factors, among which age is mentioned as one of the most important. The pu rpose of this paper was to investigate whether there are differences in the use of internal state word s between children of two age groups. The research sample consisted of 114 children (younger group 5;01 6;11 years old and older group 7;00 9;09 years old ). Part of the data came from the CHILDES Croatian MAIN Narrative Corpus (Hržica and Roch, 2020), the other part was collecte d within the project Multilevel approach to spoken discourse in language development (HRZZ UIP 2017 05 6603). The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) was developed to assess the narrative skills of children learning one or more languages from birth or early age. The number of words for internal stat es was calculated according to the MAIN and divided into: words describ ing perception, words describ ing physiological states, words describ ing consciousness , words describ ing emotional states, mental verbs and language ( verbs. T o determine the significance of the differences in the proportion of internal state words in the narratives between older and younger age group s a parametric statistical analysis was performed , and to examine the differences in the proportions of internal state words in relation to type, a non parametric statistical analysis was perf ormed . The results showed that there was a statistically significant difference in the proportion of internal state words use d , with a higher proportion recorded in the older age group. In addition , it was found that words referring to mental verbs and spe ech verbs were more frequent in the younger group of children, while words describing physiological states and perception were more frequent in the older grou p . For the proportions of words describing emotional states and consciousness , the differences were not statistically significant.