The study examined the influence of the semantic variable of contrastive gender of the pronoun, and the phonological variable of contrastive stress of the pronoun, on four- to eight-year-old children's comprehension of syntactic structures containing the nonidentity pronominal reference. Four types of items were generated: those containing syntactic information, those containing syntactic and semantic information, those containing syntactic and phonological information, and those containing syntactic, semantic, and phonological information. Multivariate analyses of variance examining differences between item types indicated that the semantic variable enhanced comprehension, while the phonological variable did not. Children can efficiently use a semantic strategy to aid comprehension at age five. (Author)