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 (i.e. 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
speaker's 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-olds'
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 speaker's 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.