Childrenʼs judgements about intentionally and unintentionally broken promises This research was conducted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the first authorʼs MS degree and was partially funded by National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Grant No. R01 HD24356 awarded to Leonard Abbeduto. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the biennial convention of the Society for Research in Child Development, New Orleans, LA in March 1993. The authors thank Drs. Robert Enright, Deborah Vandell, and Joel Levin for their insightful suggestions. We also thank the Madison Metropolitan School District and the teachers and students whose participation and support made this research possible.

摘要: Astington (1988) found that seven-to nine-year-olds often fail to distinguish between promises and predictions when judging the utterances of characters in simple stories. Instead, these children attend only to the outcome of the story (ie whether the promised event occurred) when deciding whether a promise has been made and, to a lesser extent, when deciding whether the speaker is responsible for the outcome. The purpose of the present study was to examine whether seven-to nine-year-olds (a) vary their judgements of responsibility according to the reason that the promised action was not completed, and (b) recognize that an unfulfilled promise is a promise regardless of whether the speakerʼs failure is unavoidable or intentional. Seven-year-olds, nine-year-olds, and adults were asked to make promise and responsibility judgements for two story types: stories in which the promiser intentionally failed to fulfil his or her promise and stories in which an unforeseen event prevented the promiser from fulfilling the promise. Participants at all ages assigned responsibility correctly across both story types. In making promise judgements, however, the seven-year-oldsʼ decisions about promises reflected a misguided attention to the outcome of a promise or the obstacle to its fulfilment. The nine-year-olds recognized that an unfulfilled promise is a promise but only when there was a clear reason for the speakerʼs failure to fulfil his or her obligation. We suggest that children consider only sincere promises to be instances of promising and make inferences about speaker sincerity by looking to external factors in the communicative context.