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Young children's understanding of promising: methodological considerations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 February 1998

FAY K. MAAS  and
LEONARD ABBEDUTO
FAY K. MAAS
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin–Madison
LEONARD ABBEDUTO
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin–Madison
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Abstract

In her inceptive study of promising, Astington (1988) found that five-year-olds failed to distinguish promises from predictions when judging story characters' utterances. Instead, their responses were based on whether the promised event had actually occurred. There is reason to believe, however, that the children's poor performance was an artefact of Astington's procedures. We tested this possibility with 32 children (mean age 5;8: range 5;7–6;2) by including several variations of Astington's procedures, but found no effects on the pattern of results. This suggests that Astington's findings are an accurate reflection of the developmental course of knowledge about promising.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , February 1998 , pp. 203 - 214
Copyright
© 1998 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This research was conducted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the first author's M.S. degree and was partly funded by National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Grant No. RO1 HD24356 awarded to Leonard Abbeduto. Results were presented at the biennial convention of the Society for Research in Child Development, New Orleans, LA in March 1993. The authors thank Dr Robert Enright, Dr Deborah Vandell and Dr Joel Levin for their insightful suggestions on this project. We also thank the Madison Metropolitan School District and the teachers and students who made this research possible.