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Hristo Kyuchukov, Jill de Villeirs УДК 81'23
ROMA CHILDREN'S KNOWLDGE ON ROMANI
Abstract: The paper presents preliminary findings form a research with Roma children from Bulgaria. 30 Roma children between the age of 3;0 - 6;0 years old were tested with specially developed test to measuring the level of knowledge of 9 grammatical categories in Romani language, however in the paper are presented only results about the knowledge of 3 categories: wh- questions, wh -complement and passives. The Roma children are normally developing, The results show that with the growth of the age the knowledge of the children on these three categories increase as well.
Keywords: assessment, Romani language, children.
Introduction
At the age of 1-3 years, Roma children learn the grammatical rules of Romani as a mother tongue in the same way as any normally developing children learn any other language as a mother tongue [Brown, 1973; Bowerman, 1973; de Villier and de Villiers, 1978; Slobin,1985]. In an earlier publication, Kyuchukov (2005) described some strategies used by the Roma mothers for introducing Roma grammar using songs and fairytales. But they also use a strategy known in the literature "say after me," known from the classic study by Shieffelin (1986) with Kaluli children. The Roma mothers in Bulgaria use the same strategies using the Roma words penta (say it) or another strategy which is popular among the Indian mothers, where the mother names an object and asks the child to bring that object to her, finding it among many other objects.
It is known that Roma children usually grow up as bilinguals and learn two or three languages simultaneously from a very early age. In many East and Central European countries, Roma children attend kindergartens and they start learning the official language of the country in a systematic way. Romani language, the mother tongue, is not used in the educational systems of the countries and it is not regarded as an asset, but exactly the opposite. Very often teachers, educators and researchers think Romani creates problems in the learning process of the official language. This is why in many cases the teachers and caregivers in kindergartens and preschools forbid the children to use their mother tongue at school.
Although there are recommendations by the Council of Europe that Romani should be introduced in kindergartens by the age of 3 (see Council of Europe Recommendation CM/Rec (2009)4 (June 2009) on Roma education), in many countries this is not done yet.
A recent UNHCR Report (2012: para.10) on Bulgaria is critical:
"[...] article 36 (2) of the Constitution states that "citizens whose mother tongue is not Bulgarian shall have the right to study and use their own language alongside the compulsory study of the Bulgarian language." However, this is not interpreted as providing the right for minorities to receive education in their mother tongue as the language of instruction. Minority languages can be studied as "selected subjects" where a sufficient minimum number of students make the choice. Bulgaria has not signed or ratified the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages which requires the provision of education in regional or minority languages and the provision of judicial administrative and public services in minority languages."
UNHCR points out (para. 25): "Many Roma start school without a proper grasp of Bulgarian since they commonly speak Romany or Turkish in their community interactions; this leaves them disadvantaged from the early years of education. The 2011 census data revealed that 85 per cent of Roma identified Roma as their mother tongue." Its assessment (para. 79) "The Government's obligation to guarantee equal access to quality education for Roma children remains overwhelmingly unfulfilled."
There are no published studies on the knowledge of the children in Romani between the age of 3 and 6 years. There is no systematic scientific information about the level of knowledge of Roma children on different grammatical categories in Romani. Consequently, using the methodology of Hirsh-Pasek, Kohankoff, Newcombe and de Villiers (2005), a new test for language assessment of Romani language was developed. It is based on the idea of Hirsch-Pasek et al. that an "assessment should be built on current empirical work in the various developmental domains" (p.1). The approach is to use the newly developed Romani language assessment test to measure the knowledge of the children living in countries where the Slavic languages are the official language of the country in order to find what are the level of knowledge of Romani, such as Bulgaria, Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Ukraine.
The Study
The tests consisted of the following subtests, for a total of 80 items:
• Test 1- Wh- questions: asked whether children give exhaustive answers to questions such as "who slept where"?
• Test 2 - Wh complements. This test asks whether 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 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 test (Gleason, 1958)..
• Test 6 - Aspect: comprehension of ongoing versus completed aspect was tested.
• Test 7 - Tense: Novel verbs were used to tap tense production in a wug test
• Test 8 - Fast mapping nouns: novel nouns were introduced for which gender morphology allowed their correct referent to be determined.
• Test 9 - Fast mapping adjectives: novel adjectives were used whose gendered morphology could be used to narrow down the referents.
The children involved in the study are between the age of 3 to 6 years old and all of them are from southeastern Bulgaria, from the village of Rosen, near the city of Burgas. A total of 30 children were tested, divided into three age groups:
1st group:. 3;0 - 3;11 years old
2nd group:. 4;0 - 4;11 years old
3rd group:. 5;0 - 6;0 years.
Some preliminary results
Here we present the results of only three subtests. It is important to note that none
of these aspects has been tested before with children who speak Romani, so this is new research and we need to establish baselines.
• Wh-pairs, that tested whether children gave exhaustive responses to "who bought what?" This required an expressive response. This logical property of wh-questions, that they require an exhaustive, paired response, has been the subject of much recent research across a variety of European languages. It is well established that children who do not gain this aspect of exhaustivity on the usual timetable are at risk for difficulties in language development in English.
• Passives, a picture choice test (out of 3) looking at both actions and psychological verbs. Passives represent another aspect of syntax that is demanding in the preschool and early school years, because understanding passive sentences relies on subtle morphology that indicates that the usual order of agent and patient is reversed. In other languages, problems with passive are frequent in language disorders.
• Complements, looking at children's answers to wh-questions from either tensed or nonfinite clauses with the verb "say". This also required a short expressive response. Complement clauses entail embedding of a sentence under a verb, and they are examples of recursion. The tense of complements is very critical for indicating whether the clause has a truth value, or is about something that has not yet happened. The integration of the hierarchy of clauses and the tense makes this challenging for preschool children and a good kind of test for delays.
Although the number of the children in the study is limited, the results from the three subtests show some promising trends. First we note how the age groups did in the overall score. The results are shown in the Graph 1.
Graph 1. Overall score of the groups
6.5*
6.0'
5.5'
5.0'
As can be seen from the graph, the children show significant differences by age. The younger children 3;0 - 3;11 years old have the lowest result in all subtests, and the oldest children 5;0 - 6;0 years old have the highest results in all three subtests. This means the tests have the right properties of discriminating well by age.
These results are also shown clearly in Table 1. The significant difference by age group (F=4.026, p=.03) is shown clearly.
Table 1. The significant difference in score by age groups Tests of Between - Subjects Effects
Dependent Variable: total
Source Type III Sum of Squares df Mean Square F Sig.
Corrected Model 12.926 a 2 6.463 4.026 0.32
Intercept 719.734 1 719.734 448.378 .000
group 12.926 2 6.463 4.026 .032
Error 35.314 22 1.605
Total 799.000 25
Corrected Total 48.240 24
a. R Squared = .268 (Adjusted R Squared = .201)
It is useful to examine how the children performed in the tests themselves. The tests were adapted into the dialect of the children as needed.
In regard to performance of the passive test, it is evident that the results are not significant by type, but are significant by age. Previous work across several languages has demonstrated that children show more difficulty with the type of passives with mental or stative verbs rather than simple action verbs, These results are shown in Table 2.
Table 2. Results from Passive Sub-test
Tests of Within - Subjects Contrasts
Measure: MEASURE 1
Source typepassive Type III Sum of Squares type df Mean Square F Sig.
typepassive Linear .004 1 .004 .001 .971
typepassive * group Linear 2.482 2 1.241 .443 .647
Error (typepassive) Linear 70.000 25 2.800
Tests of Between - Subjects Effects
Measure: MEASURE_1 Transformed Variable: Average
Source Type III Sum of Squares df Mean Square F Sig.
Intercept 2111.850 1 2111.850 1609.642 .000
group 14.254 2 7.127 5.432 .011
Error 32.800 25 1.312
It is clear that the passive types do not differ statistically, but the results are significant only by age groups. This can be seen in the Graph 2.
Graph 2. Results from passives test
7.00 6.50
¡6.00
§
5.50 5.00
One can see that with increased age, the children's knowledge of passives increases as well.
Let us look how the children perform in the next test: the wh-questions. Again the results are presented in table and graph form. The results in Table 3 show that the wh-test works very well, showing increase with age.
Table 3. Results from wh- test
Tests of Between - Subjects Effects Dependent Variable: totwh
actionpassives
stativepassives
1-
2
group
Source Type III Sum of Squares df Mean Square F Sig.
Corrected Model 33.663 a 2 16.832 5.240 .013
Intercept 697.545 1 697.545 217.171 .000
agegrp 33.663 2 16.832 5.240 .013
Error 73.875 23 3.212
Total 840.000 26
Corrected Total 107.538 25
a. R Squared = .313 (Adjusted R Squared = .253)
However, with this small sample, the test is significant only for children between the ages of 3 and 5 years. There is no significant difference between children 3 and 4 years old and children 4 and 5 years old.
The complements or embedded sentences show a very clear significant difference by tense type. Graph 3 shows indicates that the children perform much better in the nonfinite type of complements than the finite. This has been noted elsewhere, such as in English and German, where it was found that children have a much easier time understanding:
1) What did the man say to bring?
than the tensed counterpart
2) What did the man say he brought?
This is true even when the scenarios for each type depict events that entail some "mistake," e.g. "the person did not bring what the man said to bring" in 1), or "that man did not bring what he said he brought," in 2). Importantly in Romani, the surface differences between the two types are very minor, yet they are clearly discriminated by the children.
Graph 3. Performance of complements test
4.00
3.50
3.00
2.50 -
2.00
group
The performance in the complements test show the effect of tense and age. With increased age, the children's performance improves and they are much better answering at wh-questions with the nonfinite type of complements. This is displayed in Table 4.
1
Table 4. Results from the complements test
Tests of Within - Subjects Contrasts
Measure: MEASURE 1
Source tense Type III Sum of Squares type df Mean Square F Sig.
tense Linear 13.062 1 13.062 17.739 .000
tense * group Linear 2.720 2 1.360 1.847 .181
Error (tense) Linear 16.200 22 .736
Tests of Between - Subjects Effects
Measure: MEASURE_1 Transformed Variable: Average
Source Type III Sum of Squares df Mean Square F Sig.
Intercept 359.867 1 359.867 448.378 .000
group 6.463 2 3.231 4.026 .032
Error 17.657 22 .803
Conclusions
Although the number of the children is limited in the study, preliminary results show some significant trends:
1. With increased age the children perform much better on each of the tests.
2. Most of the children display a good knowledge of the grammatical categories from their mother tongue, compatible with the results on similar tests in other languages.
These results demonstrate that the Roma children, similar to other children in the age bracket 3;0-6;0 years, acquire all grammatical categories from the language, and this is a good basis for further mother tongue education of Roma children in the preschool and primary school. It can potentially serve as a test for demonstrating competence as they enter school, and identifying those children who have genuine language problems in their mother tongue, once norms from a larger group are fully established.
References
Brown, R. A First Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1973. Bowerman, M. Early syntactic Development. Cambridge University Press. 1973. de Villiers, J. and de Villiers, P. Language Acquisition. Harvard University Press.
1973.
Gleason, J. B. The Child's Learning of English Morphology. Word, 14. - P. 150177. 1958.
Kyuchukov, H. Early socialization of Roma children in Bulgaria. In: Xoan Paulo Rodriguez-Yanez, Anxo M. Lorenzo Suarez & Fernando Ramallo (eds.), Bilingualizm and Education: From the Family to the School. Muenchen: Lincom Europa. 2005.
Pasek, Kohankoff, Newcombe and de Villiers Using scientific knowledge to inform preschool assessment: Making the case for "empirical validity". Social Policy Report, v. XIX, N 1, - P. 3-11. 2005.
Shieffelin, B. The acquisition of Kaluli. In D. Slobin (ed.), The cross-linguistic study of language acquisition. Hillsdale, N.J. Erlbaum. - P. 525-593. 1986.
Slobin, D. Croslinguistic Evidence for the Language-Making Capacity. In: D. Slobin (ed.) The crosslinguistic study of Language acquisition, vol. II, Theoretical issues. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. 1985.
UNHCR UN Human Rights Council, Report of the independent expert on minority issues. http://bit.ly/xINets, 2012.
