Roma Children’s Language Learning and its Relation to “Theory of Mind”

Introduction

A new psychological study by two Romanian psychologists (Dolean & Calugar, 2020), which measured the IQ of Roma children with the Raven’s Progressive Matrices test (RPM), set out “to expand (Rushton & Čvorović’s, 2007) findings by measuring the general intelligence (g) of an identically sized sample of Roma using the same test (Raven’s Progressive Matrices, RPM),” but focused on children. Ultimately, Dolean and Calugar found themselves agreeing with Rushton et al.’s conclusion that Roma are less intelligent than white people, though they attributed a larger share of the difference to socio-economic causes. Despite offering a strong critique of the use of the RPM as a culturally biased measurement of “non-verbal” intelligence, they used the same measurement in their research, producing results that “confirm most of the assumptions of Rushton et al.”

This 2007 finding was part of a broader claim propagated by Rushton and his associates at the Ulster Institute of Social Research since the 1980s. That claim supports the dubious theory that people from warmer regions are essentially less intelligent than people from colder regions, and that genetic differences between “nations” are at least as important as environmental factors in explaining observed differences between groups. That research paper was funded in part by the Pioneer Fund, which has been classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center (https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/pioneer-fund) as a “white nationalist” organization. Since 1937 the Pioneer Fund has supported a coterie of mostly American and British race scientists, massively funding friendly journals and researchers to propagate eugenic pseudoscience. Rushton was recently denounced for his racism by the very University (Western Ontario) at which he had been tenured, in a terrible and unsettling memorial: https://psychology.uwo.ca/people/faculty/remembrance/rushton.html.

Rushton did his work on racial differences in IQ on populations distant from North America. He took his research to two places where there was less resistance, if not a welcoming atmosphere, to his claims: South Africa and Eastern Europe (Romania, in this case), where his particular interest – shall we say target? – was the Roma.

The article in Frontiers in Psychology by Dolen and Calugar (2020) was written as if none of this history was relevant to a reading of Rushton’s work. Rather than furthering the cause of Romani inclusion – the express purpose of the grant that sponsored this research – the publication of this article offered a rationale for continued unequal treatment by branding the Roma as inferior. The authors failed to note that the theories of race and intelligence that they expand upon have been almost universally discredited on methodological, scientific, and moral grounds (See Yudel et al., 2016 and Winston, 2020, for examples).

The authors also showed ignorance of the history of the Roma during World War II, when the Nazis in Germany were doing similar IQ test with Roma children in order to send them to gas chambers in Auschwitz (Justin, 1943). One can easily see that the differences between the studies during WWII and the ones today by authors such as Rushton and Cvorovic (2007) and Dolen and Calugar (2020) amount to just one thing: nowadays authors do not recommend that Roma children be killed because of their “poor IQ,” as the Nazi pseudo-scientists did.

All the above-mentioned studies are dangerous because they make generalizations based on a skewed view of the problem. Even when the IQ tests are non-verbal, the instructions are given in the official language of the country, despite the fact that not all the tested Roma children know and understand it well. If they do not understand the language, it is quite possible for the children to perform poorly on the test. In most European countries psychologists doing research with Roma children use only the official language, and don’t make available a native speaker of Romani to translate or give instructions in the children’s mother tongue.

The motivation for my study is exactly this: to show how these children perform psychological tasks when the same tests are given in their mother tongue versus their second language (the official language of the country).

Nowadays the Roma, although they are citizens of the state in which they live, can also be considered part of a “stateless nation” (McGarry, 2011). They have the same language (Romani, which belongs to Indo-Aryan languages) and the same historical background (they come from India); most of them have a strong Roma identity. All these factors influence the children in most of the Roma communities in Europe and around the world, who are still living a traditional life. Many Roma experience poverty, and very often the children’s poverty and state of knowledge are associated with each other. Most studies on this population do not consider what the children know in their native language and culture, because the Romani language is not seen as something positive. In fact, it is often the exact opposite: some researchers (Bakalar, 2004) and some governments (for example, the Ministry of Education of Bulgaria) consider knowing Romani as a mother tongue as the biggest obstacle to the “integration” of Roma children. In other words, if a bilingual child knows his mother tongue, and cannot be integrated into the school system, it is not the system that is to be blamed, but the child for his bilingualism, and his family for supporting the child in learning his mother tongue.

A child’s ability to understand people’s mental states shows that he or she has developed a Theory of Mind (ToM). Many researchers over the last approximately 50 years have done work on the ToM, but the classical works are those of Wimmer and Perner (1983) and Premack and Woodroof (1978). The ToM is connected with understanding of other people’s desires, emotions, beliefs, and intentions. Lately the interest in bilingual children and their ToM is increasing, and different researchers are looking for a connection between the knowledge of different grammatical categories and the ToM. Many researchers argued that it is syntax that plays a significant role in theory of mind acquisition – from basic syntax such as word order (Astington & Jenkins, 1999) to more complex syntax such as relative clauses or object complements (Smith, Apperly, & White, 2003; de Villiers & de Villiers, 2000; de Villiers & Payres, 2002).

Methods

Testing of Romani-speaking children

A test with 9 sub-tests was developed in the Romani language, taking into account the peculiarities of Romani grammar (Kyuchukov & de Villiers, 2018). The test had two characteristics: 1) to check the children’s knowledge of different grammatical categories and 2) to predict the ability of the children to apply their old knowledge to new phenomena from the same category.

Roma children from the Čergari group in the Kozari put settlement in Zagreb, Croatia were tested. The children are from the group of Bosnian and Kosovo Roma; the Bosnian Roma are the majority. In the Roma settlement there is a community kindergarten organized in a private house; there is a minibus which brings the children to the kindergarten from different parts of the settlement. There are also children who come from another small settlement, Savica, where the living conditions are extremely poor: there is no electricity or water, and the houses are made from waste materials.

In the kindergarten there is a native Croatian teacher and a Roma mediator. The conditions in the kindergarten are poor: there is no computer, limited access to books, and no sport facilities. The children speak poor Croatian. They know Romani, but Romani is not used for communication. The parents use it as a secret language. In most cases the children understand and to some extent speak Romani, but they get fluent in it around the age of 4-5. The language is learned in the community from communication with community members and other children. The care of the children is a responsibility for all community members; everyone takes care of the children, regardless of whose child it is.

The children were tested with seven sub-tests, outlined below:

Test 1- Wh-questions: asked whether children give exhaustive answers to questions such as “who slept where?”

Test 2 – Wh-complements: This test asked whether the children can successfully comprehend a “long distance” wh question such as “What did mother tell the boy to buy” with nonfinite and finite-tensed complements.

Test 3 – Passives: a comprehension test with two forms of passive – action verbs (hit, kick) and stative verbs (frighten, love).

Test 4: Sentence repetition: a task with relative clause structures.

Test 5 – Possessives: in Romani, both the gender/ number of the possessor and the gender/ number of the possessed dictate the possessive morphology. Known and novel nouns were used to tap expression in a wug-type test.

Test 6 – Tense: Novel verbs were used to tap tense production in a wug-type test 

Test 7 - Aspect: Comprehension of ongoing versus completed aspect was tested.

In addition to the language test, a test on the Theory of Mind was also given to the children. The Theory of Mind test gives information about the children’s knowledge of the social relations around them. Two classical False-Belief tasks were given to the children. Using these Theory of Mind tasks, we tried to see whether there was a connection between the level of children’s understanding of social relations and their language development. Both tests were performed in the Romani and Croatian languages.

Three groups of children between 3 and 6 years old (30 children in all), divided into the following age groups, were tested:

• Group 1. 3-4 years old – 10 children
• Group 2. 4-5 years old – 10 children
• Group 3. 5-6 years old – 10 children

Results

In the Romani language

In Test 1 Wh-questions, the children were shown pictures and asked questions about who did something, and where it was done. For example: Who sleeps where? or Who drives where? The results from the first sub-test are shown in the Figure 1.

Figure 1. Wh- questions - total score as a function of Age group.

The figure shows that the children successfully performed this test. As the children grew older, their knowledge grew. The differences between the age groups are statistically significant (p > 0.001).

Figure 2 shows the differences between children of different genders and ages performing the same test.

Figure 2. Influence of interaction between factors Gender and Age group on Wh- questions. Total score as a dependent variable.

The Figure 2 shows that the boys performed much better on the test than the girls did. The differences between the two groups are statistically significant (p > 0.01)

Figure 3 shows the influence of age on the children’s performance on Test 2, wh- complements. This test included questions such as: “The mother said/told her son to get her a big pot, but he got her a big glass instead. What did the mother say/tell her son to get?” The results from this test are shown below.

Figure 3. Wh- complements - total score as a function of Age group.

As one can see from the figure, the groups showed progress with the growth of age. The differences between the groups were statistically significant (p > 0.001). So, by the age of 5-6 years, the children answered these types of questions more correctly than did the 3-4 year-olds.

            Let us see if there were differences in the performance of this subtest between the boys and the girls. The results are shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4. Wh- complements - total score as a function of Gender.

Again, the boys did much better than the girls in performing the second subtest. The differences between the boys and the girls were statistically significant (p > 0.001).

Subtest 3 dealt with the children’s knowledge of passive verbs. The children were shown pictures with multiple choice options and were given sentences such as: The horse was kicked by the dog. The results are shown in the next figures. Figure 5 shows the influence of age.

Figure 1. Passive verbs - total score as a function of Age group

Here also the increase in age went along with increases in the children’s knowledge of this grammatical category, passive verbs. Again, the older children had better results than the younger children. The differences between the groups were statistically significant (p > 0.000)

What is the influence of gender? The results are shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6. Influence of interaction between factors Gender and Age group on the Passives test. Total score as a dependent variable

In the performance of this test, again the boys did better, and the statistical differences between the girls and boys were significant. The boys better understood the passive voice, but by the age of 5-6 years, the knowledge of the boys and girls was equalized.

In the next sub-test – repetition of sentences – the children had the task of repeating simple and complex sentences in Romani. The results are shown in the Figure 7 and Figure 8.

Figure 7. Repetition - total score as a function of Age group

Figure 7 shows that the differences between the groups are statistically significant, and the older children were repeating the sentences much better than the younger ones (p > 0.01)

Again, in the performance of this test the boys did much better than the girls. The results are shown in Figure 8.

Figure 8. Repetition - total score as a function of Gender

The differences between the boys and girls are statistically significant. The boys could repeat the sentences much more accurately. A big proportion of the sentences were complex, so in order to be able to repeat them, the child had to have understood these structures and used them in his communication.

In the next test – Possessives – the children had the task of applying old knowledge to new objects and subjects. For example, to produce a sentence about the horse’s balloon while looking at a picture is easy for the children, but what happens if we have an unknown subject and object, for example, Boko as a subject and suki as an object. Boko and suki are made-up words, which do not exist in the Romani language. Do the children know to use the grammatical rules about possessives and apply them to words that are new to them? The results show that the children could do that successfully, and there were no statistical differences between the age groups. All the age groups performed this test equally well, but when comparing the result of the boys and girls, we saw again that the boys did better than the girls. The differences are statistically significant (p > 0.0000) This is shown in Figure 9.

Figure 9. Possessives - total score as a function of Gender

The Tense test showed that the children knew and used correctly the Present, Future, and Past tenses. Here also, as in the previous test, there were made-up verbs which do not exist in Romani, and the children were tested as to whether they could apply the grammatical rules for the three tenses to verbs unknown to them. The results show that the children were performing the test successfully, and that there are statistically significant differences between the groups (p > 0.01). This is shown in Figure 10.

Figure 10. Tense - Total score as a function of Age group

Again, the boys were much better at performing this test. The differences between the results of the boys and the girls are statistically significant (p > 0.0000). This shown in Figure 11.

Figure 11. Tense - total score as a function of Gender

The Aspect tests measured the children’s knowledge of the aspect of the verbs. In Romani, as in many Slavic languages, there are two aspects: complete and incomplete. One and the same verb can show both actions, depending on the suffixes used. However, the children were given made-up verbs and this tested their ability to apply the grammatical rules using different suffixes to unknown verbs. The results are given in Figure 12.

Figure 12. Aspect - total score as a function of Age group

The results of the groups are statistically significant (p > 0.001). Older children were much better at applying the suffixes to unknown verbs than the younger children. However, all of them could follow the rules and use them correctly. Who did better, the boys or the girls? This is shown in Figure 13.

Figure 13. Aspect - total score as a function of Gender

Again, the boys performed better on this test. It seems they knew the rules of this grammatical category better than the girls did.

In most studies on children’s language development around the world, the girls are the ones who have better language skills than boys. But as we see in this study, the boys are actually performing better than the girls on all the tests. This means that the boys have better developed grammar. But why is that? Why did the boys have better language skills in Romani than the girls?

In general in this particular community, the language used for communication is an ethnolect of Croatian. The Roma developed among themselves a variant of Croatian which is different from both standard Croatian and the dialects spoken by Croats. Any native speaker of Croatian can tell that the Croatian spoken by the Roma has an accent which makes it very different from the Croatian spoken by Croats.

            Roma girls, who are usually kept at home to help their mothers in taking care of the younger boys and all the household activities, usually hear their mothers speak to them in an ethnolect of Croatian. The boys, who are more actively involved with their fathers in activities outside their community, hear their fathers communicating with them in Romani, because outside the community, Romani serves as a secret language. So due to the fact that the boys are more often with their fathers, who speak Romani to them, they learn Romani better than the girls, who stay at home and hear their mothers speaking to them in a variant of Croatian.

In the Croatian language

Out of seven sub-tests, three were also performed in Croatian. Here are the results.

The first test was on the wh-questions. The results are shown in Figure 14.

Figure 14. Wh-questions in Croatian Language as a function of age group

As in the results of performing this test in Romani, we see that the children’s knowledge increased as they got older. Older children did better than the younger children. There are no statistical differences between the performance of the test by girls or boys.

The second test was also successfully performed in the Croatian language.

Figure 15. Complements in Croatian as a function of age group

The children also understood this test very well and answered all questions correctly. The differences between the groups are statistically significant, and the best were the older children.

The third test (passives) was a bit difficult for the children because in everyday Croatian, the passive voice is not used very much. But still it seems as though the children can perform the test; the results are shown in Figure 16.

Figure 16. Passives as a function of age group

As can be seen from the figure, the children also performed well on this test. The differences between the groups are significant, and the older children had better knowledge about passive verbs than the younger ones.

Theory of Mind Tasks

The children were given two Theory of Mind tasks. They are called False-Belief Tasks, and the main idea is to check whether the children are able to “read” other people’s mental states. The first task was called “unexpected contents” – where the child is shown an empty box of chocolates and is asked what he thinks is in the box. When the box is opened, the child finds that there are no chocolates in there, but only a pencil. Then the child is asked two questions: what did he think was in the box when he saw it for the first time? And what would a doggy puppet think if we showed the box to him?

The second task was called “mis displacement.” Two friends put a ball in a red box; then the one who put it there goes out and the second friend decides to change the position of the ball and puts it in the blue box. The first friend comes back and looks for the ball. The questions is: In which box is he going to look for the ball?

The results are presented in the following figures.

Figure 17. Unexpected content in Romani as a Function of age group

The figure shows that the younger children were not good at performing the test, but older children could perform it better. The differences between the groups are statistically significant. There are no statistical differences between the group of the boys and the girls.

In the performance of the second False-Belief task, however, there are such differences. This is shown in Figure 18.

Figure 18. Mis displacement Task in Romani as a function of Gender

One can see that the boys were better at performing this task. The differences are statistically significant between the two groups. Although the oldest group showed some decrement in the results, still as a group the boys were much better than the girls.

These were the results in Romani. How did the children perform the same tasks in Croatian? Figure 19 contains the results from the first task.

Figure 19. Unexpected content in Croatian as a function of Gender

In performing this task, the boys again achieved better results and in general, all the children understood the task. But as can be seen, the 3-4 year old girls fell far behind the 3-4 year-old boys. Although the girls spoke more Croatian, it seems that they were still less advanced in understanding the social life around them.

Let us see what the children’s results are from the second task. They are shown in Figure 20.

Figure 20. Mis displacement in Croatian as a function of Gender

The results show that the boys again began much better than the girls, but by the age of 5-6, the girls showed better results than the boys. The differences are statistically significant, and it seems that the fact that the girls knew Croatian helped them to get the higher results.

The results from the study show that the boys, who knew better Romani and had developed high grammatical structures in their mother tongue, were aided in developing high cognitive abilities and understanding of the social life and mental states of the people around them. The girls, who are opposite to the boys and who do not speak good Romani and speak only an ethnolect of Croatian, could not understand the social life around them and predict the mental states of other people. It turns out that the girls were not good in Romani as their mother tongue, and they were not good in Croatian, either.

Roma Parents

I conducted interviews on the children’s language use and knowledge with the parents of the children from the kindergarten in Kozari put in Zagreb. The interview had 15 questions. It was an adapted version of an interview developed at the University of Delaware, USA. Here is what I learned from the parents’ answers.

           Sixty-seven percent of the parents identified as Roma and 33% as Albanians, because they spoke Albanian. Usually, Roma families are extended and there is not just one caregiver. Care for the children is a responsibility of the whole family/whole community. Very often the children are left in the house for a whole day with elder siblings in the house or some adult relatives. In this way they have access to different registers and styles of communication.

Eighty percent of the mothers were illiterate, and 20% had a primary school education. The fathers were the ones with higher education – that is, a basic school education. But the parents did not have books, including children’s books, at home and they did not read books to the children. Knowledge about the world was conveyed orally by the parents and/or elder members of the family.

Thirty-three percent of the families did not have a TV at home and the children could not have access to TV programs. In the families who had TV at home, the children watched programs for a maximum of 30 min. per day, because the parents involved the children in different family activities, and watching TV was considered to be a waste of time.

None of the families had a computer at home. None of the children had smartphones or iPads or any other electronic device. There was no computer at the kindergarten either. The children had no experience with electronic devices.

The languages used at homes were primarily Croatian and Romani. Only 33% of the parents said that they used mainly Albanian at home with their children. These were Roma families who emigrated from Kosovo because of the war in ex-Yugoslavia, and they had a strong identity as Albanians, not Roma. The Croatian spoken in the homes of the Roma and in the whole community was not the standard Croatian but rather an ethnolect, created by the Roma in their communication among themselves.

Among siblings and in communication with other children from the community, a mixture of Croatian and Romani was used. The use of Romani was more common with fathers and other male adults in the community. The mothers usually spoke more Croatian.

This small questionnaire actually provided a lot of information about the language situation of the children and their families. So, if I had to summarize the situation in this particular community, the trends are clear: most of the parents are illiterate or with low education, but use Romani in communication with their children; the children do not have access to any children’s books at home; they do not have possibility to watch TV more than 30 min. a day, and have no access to computers or other electronic devices. The languages used at home and in the community are an ethnolect of Croatian, Romani, and Albanian.

Discussion and Conclusions

The results from both the grammatical and Theory of Mind tests showed that although the Roma children grow up in poverty, they acquire the most complex grammatical categories. By the age of 5 years, they also can perform the Theory of Mind tasks. The children do not have access to new technologies such as iPads, tablets, the Internet, or TV sets. However, they grow up in a community where the communication is mainly in Romani and the children from an early age are used to different kinds of registers.

In the search for the connection between language and Theory of Mind up until now in general the scientific literature has not paid attention to complex grammatical categories but only took into account the subjects’ knowledge of different aspects of syntax. In answer to my research questions, I can say that the Roma children followed the pathway of all normally developing children learning any language as a mother tongue. Around the age of 5 years, the Roma children know most of the complex grammatical categories in their mother tongue (L1), and they have the ability to transfer their old knowledge to new objects and subjects. The children also learn the Croatian language as their second language (L2) from communication with their parents. It is clear that their knowledge of the grammatical categories is related to their understanding of ToM tasks. The boys, who know Romani grammatical categories better, are also better at solving ToM tasks in Romani, and the girls, who are better in the Croatian language, are better at solving them in the Croatian langue.

Studies done by psychologists in Europe who are trying to prove a connection between children’s ethnic Roma background and their low IQ test scores have no place in contemporary science, because we know from history what horrors these kinds of studies brought to humanity. Using old-fashioned methodologies, which are forbidden in most European countries for historical reasons, to prove the “super intelligence” of white people, does not bring any new knowledge to humanity.

Informed Consent from the Participants’ Legal Guardians

Written informed consent to participate in this study was provided by the participants’ legal guardians.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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