An Experimental Study On The Comprehension And Metapragmatic Knowledge Of Promising In Chinese-Speaking Children

Promising is a frequently occurring linguistic phenomenon between interlocutors, especially in adult-child interactions. But studies based on developmental psycho-linguistics, using experimental methods to investigate how children understand promisingand how their metapragmatic knowledge increases; are really rare. There're onlyseveral studies conducted with native speakers of English and French. This thesis adopts the research methods in experimental pragmatics, applying the theoretical perspectives offered by speech act theory, through two experiments with preparatory condition and sincerity condition proposed by Searl's definition of promising as the independent variables, conducted by story-completion task and metapragmatic knowledge among 630 3, 6 and 9-year-old Chinese children in order to explore how Chinese children's comprehension and metapragmatic knowledge of promising develop.Through the analysis of three factors univariate analysis with a generalized linear model (GLM) and a Paired-Samples T Test, the major findings of the present study are summed up as follows:(1) The satisfaction of preparatory condition and sincerity condition can promote children's comprehension of promising; sincerity condition cues are understood before preparatory condition cues, for by the age of 6, children are able to correctly interpret promising on the basis of sincerity condition cues while for preparatory condition, prototypical situations can facilitate the correct comprehension of promising before the age of 9; children at age of 3 and 6 highly depend on the accomplishment of the action described in the propositional content of the utterance when the preparatory condition is not met.(2) Metapragmatic knowledge is found to evolve with age: although really rare, children at the age of 3 begin to take the preparatory condition and sincerity condition into consideration; action-execution justifications are given mostly by the 6-year-old children; justifications mentioning listener's desires or/and speaker's intentions begin to become the majority at the age of 9; for the subjects of age 6 and 9, especially of 9, when the preparatory condition is not met, the non-satisfaction of the preparatory condition can promote the number of justifications mentioning listener's desires, but when the sincerity condition is not met, the non-satisfaction of the sincerity condition can promote the number of justifications mentioning speaker's intention.