Maas F K, Abbeduto L
University of Wisconsin, Waisman Center, Madison 53705, USA.
J Child Lang. 1998 Feb;25(1):203-14. doi: 10.1017/s0305000997003346.
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.
在对“承诺”进行开创性研究时，阿斯廷顿（1988年）发现，五岁的儿童在判断故事人物的话语时，无法区分承诺和预测。相反，他们的反应基于承诺的事件是否真的发生了。然而，有理由相信，孩子们的糟糕表现是阿斯廷顿研究方法导致的假象。我们对32名儿童（平均年龄5岁8个月；范围为5岁7个月至6岁2个月）进行了测试，采用了阿斯廷顿研究方法的几种变体，但没有发现对结果模式有任何影响。这表明阿斯廷顿的研究结果准确反映了关于承诺的知识的发展过程。
