Theory of Mind and evidentiality in Romani-Bulgarian bilingual children

• Authors: Hristo Kyuchukov , Jill De Villiers
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The paper reports two studies of the development of false belief reasoning in bilingual Roma children in Bulgaria. No previous work has considered Roma children. Two studies were conducted, and in the second study the Roma children spoke a dialect of Romani that contains evidential markers, as does Bulgarian, their second language. Results reveal no advantage of bilingualism, and similar results with age to that found in other groups across the world. The bilingual group had better understanding of evidentials than the monolingual Bulgarian group, possibly related to the linguistic character of the markings. There is contradictory evidence about the relation of ToM and understanding of evidentiality.

Keywords

EN

Theory of Mind; bilingualism; Romani language; evidentiality

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Psychology of Language and Communication
• Year: 2009
• Volume: 13
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 21-34

Dates

published

2009-01-01

online

2009-11-06

Contributors

author

Hristo Kyuchukov

• Constantine the Philosopher University, Nitra

author

Jill De Villiers

• Smith College, Northampton

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Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/v10057-009-0007-4