Ninety French-speaking children aged 2 to 4 years were presented with short utterances containing homophonous or nonce words whose object or action meaning was identifiable on the sole basis of the preceding grammatical morpheme. Items in noun and verb contexts were presented to the same children in order to assess their ability to provide appropriate contrastive interpretations. Results show that, at all ages, items were correctly identified beyond chance, with 4-year-olds outperforming the 2- and 3-year-olds. Individually, however, only part of the children, even in the older group, performed beyond chance level, suggesting substantial interindividual variability and difficulties, still present at these ages, to tackle situations offering minimal information. A case study of the developmental relation between production and comprehension is also presented