This study investigated the story retell of preschool children with typical language skills under three different retell conditions (toy prop cues, picture-book cues, and no cues). Gender differences were also investigated. The results of both are presented in two papers. Method: A picture book was read to 29 preschool children (ages 4;6 to 5;6) three times over the course of three weeks, and a naive listener elicited story retells from the children under three conditions (toy prop cues, picture-book cues, and no cues). Retells were analyzed by the researchers for presence and sequence of story grammar elements and by SALT software for total number of words, number of different words, and mean length of communication unit (MLCU). Gender differences were also analyzed. Results: Children's retells under the picture-book cues condition contained a significantly higher number of story grammar elements (than the toy prop cues and no cues conditions), total number of words, and number of different words than the no cues condition. There was no significant difference in MLCU in any of the conditions. No significant differences were found between the toy prop cues and no cues conditions. Girls outperformed boys on measures of story grammar elements, total number of words, number of different words, and MLCU, but there was no significant difference between girls and boys on any of the story retell conditions. Conclusion: The method of cuing used to elicit story retells from preschoolers can result in different language performance. Using pictures from the book resulted in the higher quality retells when measuring language skills than the no cues condition. There was only a significant difference between the picture-book cues condition and the toy prop cues condition on number of story grammar elements. Girls tend to perform better than boys on these selected narrative measures