La cognition Mandombe dans les apprentissages préscolaires congolais : étude pilote

Résumé

This study explores whether early exposure to Mandombe, taught alongside the national Latin based curriculum, is associated with small but coherent differences in attention, visuospatial working memory and shape based emotional coding in Congolese children aged 5 to 7 years. Mandombe is a geometric script in which young learners must rotate and project units in imagined three dimensional space, map orientation to sound and tone, plan continuous stroke paths from the singini starting point to the end of each zita and vary line qualities such as length, curvature and angle to convey emotion, speed and melodic contour.

Longitudinal cohorts described by Nsiangani showed that older children educated through Mandombe often combined rapid progress in mathematics and symbolic reasoning with heightened sensitivity to small visual and emotional cues. He suggested that the emotional and prosodic coding built into the script might contribute to this profile but left that part of the hypothesis largely unexplored.

Here we work with younger children in a natural setting. We compare 5–7 year olds from CENA Nsanda centres in Kinshasa and Kongo Central, where Mandombe is integrated into preschool and first grade as a regular activity, with age matched peers from nearby Latin only schools. All children completed a short tablet based battery that included an age adapted continuous performance task, a mvuala style visuospatial span, a verbal span, a 2D to 3D “tower view” task, an orientation to sound mapping game, a continuous stroke path task from a singini point, an emotion shape learning game, an emotion tagged recognition task and a simple shape prosody matching task.

Children with at least one year of regular Mandombe activities showed modest advantages on sustained attention in shape based blocks, visuospatial span, 2D to 3D mapping, orientation sound mapping and continuous stroke control, as well as faster learning and better transfer of emotion shape rules and a stronger memory benefit for emotion tagged shapes. No differences appeared on verbal span, and results were small or inconsistent on purely picture based attention trials. These findings do not support broad claims of superiority. They suggest that early Mandombe practice, as it currently exists in Nsanda, functions as a structured training field for a cluster of geometric and emotional operations that can already be detected by age seven.