Recent investigations have demonstrated that white middle-class preschoolers are sensitive to temporal order, understand that causes precede consequences, and can identify the causes and consequences of events. The present study is an attempt to extend these recent investigations of temporal order understanding to a non-middle-income, non-white population. A series of three experiments were conducted to examine low-income black preschoolers' (approximately 5 years of age) to comprehend the temporal relationships between events; however, their ability to demonstrate their understanding is limited when procedures demand the perceptual encoding of visual material. Consistent findings indicating equal ability to reason about temporal relationships in a backward or forward direction suggest that when the task is sufficiently simplified for preschoolers (i.e., one sequence is presented, and memory or inferential reasoning demands are held at a minimum) simultaneous emergence of backward and forward reasoning is evident. It is concluded that low-income black preschoolers exhibit entry-level skills in the development of operations for comprehending temporal relationships. (Author/MP)