Preschool children, elementary school students, and adults participated in a study that examined various processes used to interpret contradictory communications. A screening test determined that all subjects were capable of discriminating between contradictory and congruent communications. Subjects were presented with contradictory verbal-facial messages in contextually impoverished and enriched conditions. Research in the area of ambiguous communications has suggested that preschoolers assume a one-to-one correspondence between the contents of a message and its meaning, and would therefore interpret contradictory communications by negating the contents of the verbal or facial cues. Older subjects, in contrast, were expected to interpret the communications by using available contextual information to validate the meaning of both verbal and facial message components. Thus, interpretations were expected to vary as a joint function of the subject's cognitive-developmental understanding of communication and the context in which specific communications were embedded. Findings confirmed these hypotheses. (Author/RH)