วัจนกรรมการสัญญาของเด็กไทย : การศึกษาเชิงอภิวัจนปฏิบัติศาสตร์ / สินี วณิชชานนท์ = The speech act of promising in Thai children : a metapragmatic study / Sinee Wanitchanon
This study is aimed at investigating Thai children's comprehension and metapragmatic knowledge of the speech act of promising. A group of 45 pupils from Somthawil School chosen through random sampling are divided into three categories, namely 6-year old, 8-year old, and 11-year old. There are three factors involved in this study: age, conditions governing the speech act of promising (preparatory condition and sincerity condition), and linguistic forms (the verb "promise" and a marker of future time). There are two kinds of instrument used in this research: an interview questionnaire consisting of eight comic strip stories, and a series of questions designed to test the children's metapragmatic knowledge of the speech act of promising. It is hypothesized in this study that (1) an ability to explain the speech act of promising among Thai children increases by age, (2) the children understand the sincerity condition better than the preparatory condition, and (3) they understand the utterance with the verb promise better than that with the marker of future time. The findings both accept and reject the hypotheses. The metapragmatic knowledge of Thai children increases by age, the differences are statistically significant (p<.05). There are no significant differences found in the rest of the hypotheses.
