A study examined how preschool children use information about linguistic contrast in learning new words. The 72 subjects were assigned to four groups to play a game. They were asked to get an unfamiliar item, one of nine swatches of different colors, shapes, and materials. In the first group, the children were told only one label (color, shape, or material), and in the other three groups, the objects were identified by a novel word contrasted with two familiar words from the same semantic domain (e.g., "it's not yellow, it's not green; it's mauve"). Five tests (sorting, hyponym, color identification, material identification, and shape identification tasks) were then administered to discover what the children thought their new words meant. Results suggested that some of the novel words introduced corresponded to concepts the children already had names for (e.g., "green" to identify "chartreuse"). It was concluded that children may deal with new information in word learning by making the most of whatever information seems to make sense, given their prior knowledge and beliefs, while quickly ignoring or forgetting the rest. (MSE)