A study investigated Japanese 3-to-5-year-olds' comprehension of sentences using the temporal terms "before" and "after" and examined whether contextual information helped the children respond correctly. The children were asked to perform a task with a toy either before or after performing another task with a different toy. Some children were provided with a choice of toy for the task (context) and others were not (no context). Results indicate that by five years, Japanese children know the meaning of temporal terms, a finding similar to that for English-speaking children. The results on contextual support suggest that contextual information was helpful in a methodological way, when the order of suggestion of the tasks matched the order of their supposed performance. This finding favors a processing rather than syntactic or semantic account of children's performance failures. (MSE)