Background: Narrative discourse is central to effective participation in conversations. When discourse is assessed in people with communication disability, structured tasks (e.g., picture descriptions) provide experimental control, while unstructured tasks (e.g., personal narratives) represent more natural communication. Immersive virtual reality (VR) technology may provide a solution by creating standardized experiences for narrative retell, therefore balancing ecological validity and experimental control in discourse assessment. Research is needed to understand how VR immersion affects narrative retell, first for adults with no communication disability, before application with adults with aphasia or related communication disability. Aims: To assess (1) the effects of VR immersion on the linguistic content and structure of narrative retells in a healthy adult population; and (2) whether VR immersion can influence the way a narrative is retold so that the speaker conveys their own experience, rather than the experience of the characters they are watching. Methods & Procedures: In this pilot cohort study, 13 healthy adult participants with no reported communication disability watched an animated short film and a comparable immersive VR short film in a randomized order. Participants were asked to retell the events of the story after each condition in as much detail as possible. Outcomes & Results: Mean length of utterance (in morphemes) was significantly higher in the video condition compared with the VR condition. Significantly more first-person pronouns were used in the VR condition compared with the video condition. No other measures of linguistic content or structure were significantly different between the VR and video conditions. Conclusions & Implications: Increased morpho-syntactic length and complexity in the video condition may suggest effects of elicitation stimulus on the narrative produced. The larger number of first-person pronouns in the VR condition may reflect that participants experienced a sense of presence in the virtual environment, and therefore were able to retell their communication experience rather than narrating the experiences of characters from an external perspective. Given the increasing need for more functional assessment of discourse in people with communication disability, further research is needed to validate these findings.