Are the Roma children “Mentally retarded” if they do not Know the Syntax in their Second Language?

Abstract

This paper presents research among Roma bilingual children from Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic and Slovakia and Russian monolingual children from Russia. The children are tested with the same linguistic test measuring the children’s knowledge on the syntax and particularly on the wh-questions. The Roma children (n=80) are tested in their second language – the official language of the country of residence, and the Russian children (n=20) are tested in their mother tongue - Russian. All of them are Slavic languages. The syntactic knowledge of both groups of children is compared. The results of the Roma children show that if they have limited knowledge in their mother tongue, their performance of the test in their second language (L2) is also limited. Roma children from Bulgaria and Croatia are much better in performing of the tests in L2, because their mother tongue is stronger in comparison to Roma children from Czech Republic and Slovakia, who demonstrated limited knowledge in their mother tongue. The Russian children show much higher results. They are tested in their mother tongue and the results show that by the age of 6 years more than 80% of the children can perform the tests correctly.