Spoken and written stories of healthy, monolingual speakers of Finnish were compared with spoken stories of aphasic subjects in order to determine in which respects narratives differed from one another. The comparison sheds light on the factors behind stylistic variation in speech and writing. Sixty stories were elicited by presenting a series of six pictures to subjects in three age groups. The same picture series was presented to five non-aphasic subjects and 15 aphasics all of whom were accepted on a first come first serve basis. Furthermore, 42 written stories were elicited by the same picture series from university students. the subjects were asked to tell or to write down the story illustrated in the picture. The pictures remained in full view throughout the task. The spoken stories were tape-recorded and then transcribed. Results did not reveal qualitative differences between the aphasic and non-aphasic subjects. The aphasic's stories were characterized by an overabundance of features typical of spoken stories. (JL)