In telling and retelling stories older adults produce more instances of ambiguous reference than young adults. The four experiments reported here suggest that this increase in ambiguous reference is not caused by age‐ or cohort‐related differences in (a) knowledge structures needed to determine coreference based on plausibility, (b) availability or weighting of strategies for using anaphoric devices, or (c) assumptions about the degree of specificity needed by discourse partners to establish clarity of reference.