El "contexto" y la adquisición del lenguajeUn estudio sobre niños mayas

Abstract

We have conducted a replication study about the development of metalinguistic reasoning (the �whys� and �why nots� of words and expressions) previously done in Spain, about the gender endings in Spanish. Subjects were 26 Maya children. Their ages ranged from 5 to 13, they were monolingual mexican (Spanish) speakers, though from bilingual (Maya-Mexican) families. Our predictions, based on the adquisition model we present, were that we wouldn�t find a formal (metalinguistic) treatment of the problem proposed, before 13 years of age. We also hipothesised the types of evolutive �mistakes� we should find: amongst the younger children the interpretation of gender as a linguistic feature in direct correspondence with concrete characteristics of reality. The elder children would show the comprehension of this linguistic feature as arbitrarily related to the characteristics of real objects: a metalinguistic or formal of comprehension. Thereon, we relate our results to the former, obtained in Spain; and we finish by considering the theoretical relevance of the results in the context of our model for the acquisition of language comprehension, as well as the meaning of �context� in our acquisiton studies.