РОЛЬ СЕМЕЙНОЙ ЯЗЫКОВОЙ СРЕДЫ В ФОРМИРОВАНИИ ТЕОРИИ СОЗНАНИЯ У РОМСКИХ (ЦЫГАНСКИХ) ДЕТЕЙ

Abstract

The article presents a study of Roma (Gypsy) children from Bulgaria as a contribution to the development of the Theory of Mind. In two studies (n = 60), so-called Fals Belief Tasks were conducted with children aged 3 to 6. The first survey was conducted with 30 rural children, and the second with 30 urban children living in a big city (capital). In both groups, the children are naturally bilingual, do not attend kindergarten, and in both cases Bulgarian is their second language and is learned at home. In the first study, children were given 4 tests for false beliefs, and in the second, two tests of the same type and two language tests. The purpose of the author was to identify the factors that contribute to the early assimilation of the theory of mind by Roma children and to experimentally establish the extent to which recognition of interrogative sentences with the mental verb “I want” and the grammatical category of evidentiality affects the development of the theory of mind in bilingual Roma children. The results unambiguously show that Roma children who grow up in large Roma families consisting of 2–3 generations acquire the Theory of Mind earlier (at the age of 3–4) compared to English-speaking children, who acquire it only between the ages of 4 and 3.5. The reason for this is that in large Roma families, children hear different registers, all in conversations with children use complex linguistic structures, which turn out to be very important for mastering the Theory of Mind. Unfortunately, the results of the second study did not support the expectation that there would be a statistically significant correlation between interrogative sentences and the category of evidentiality and theory of mind tests. The analysis was carried out using mathematical and statistical methods (t-tests and SPSS).