Escritura espontánea de la lengua maya: un estudio psicolingüístico con niños en edad escolar

Abstract

It is evident that there has been limited research concerning the spontaneous construction of orthographic regularities by children who speak indigenous languages without a writing tradition. Children are commonly not objects of study; and much less frequently have been considered as reliable informants. This study attempts to show some of the results obtained from working with children who are Mayan speakers and attend primary school in a supposedly bilingual setting. The objective of our study is to analyze; from the psycholinguistic point of view; the cognitive strategies of Mayan-speaking children upon attempting to represent their native language in writing (which they have tried to write very infrequently or almost never). For this reason; we requested 45 second-grade children and 50 sixth-grade children to write a list of Mayan words containing the five glottalized consonants: /K’/; /P’/; /T’/; /CH’/; /TS’/. Our study attempts to show the creativity and systematicness of children's ideas upon their trying to construct a system to represent their native language.