This study examined the extent of children's awareness of the semantic subtleties of the word "promise" and their comprehension of sentences following an atypical syntactic pattern using "promise" as the main verb. Subjects included children within three months of being six-and-one-half, eight-and-one-half, nine-and-one-half, and ten-and-one-half years old. Sentences were constructed to be harmonious with, or contrary to, each child's expressed expectations. One hypothesis stated that performance on sentences following a typical syntactic pattern, the Minimum Distance Principle (with "tell" as the main verb), would be affected significantly by semantic expectation only in the six-year-old age group and that performance on sentences violating the general syntactic rule (with"promise" as the main verb) would be affected significantly in the seven-, eight-, and nine-year-old groups. This hypothesis was rejected. It was further found that harmonious sentences were easier than contrary sentences. No meaningful correlation was found between children's performance on the instrument assessing awareness of the semantic subtleties of "promise" and performance on the harmonious and contrary sentences with "promise" as the main verb. (HOD)