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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 Original Article 63 Original Articles Clinical Social Work and Health Intervention Vol. 10 No. 2 2019 How monolingual and bilingual children learn a language? According to Grosjean (1994:1656) “bilinguals acquire and use their language for different purposes; in different domains of life; with different people. It is precisely because the needs and uses of the languages are usually quite different than the bilinguals really develop equal fluency in their languages. The level of fluency attained in a language (more precisely, in language skill) will depend on the need for that language and will be domain specific. It is thus perfectly normal to find bilinguals who can only read and write one of their languages; who have reduced speaking fluency in a language they only use with a limited number of people; who can only speak about a particular subject in one of their languages.” Studies conducted with pre-school children have proved that mastering the language is not simply an imitation, reproduction of adult speech samples. According to Humboldt (1984) Mastering (native) language, every child relies on vaguely sensed analogies, which are more noticeable in creatively developed children compared to those who rely only on memory. Similar analogies serve as a support to the person, independently, without any help studying foreign language. It is important only to find the spirit of these analogies, and this in any language teaching is a critical point from which the real mastery of the language and the real enjoyment of it begins (p. 347-348). When we say that mastering a language is not just an imitation, not an intuitive (unconscious) process, but first of all the development of linguistic generalizations and the elementary comprehension of linguistic phenomena, that is precisely what we mean by the „indiscernible consciousness“ reasoned presentiment vaguely perceived analogies. Sohin wrote: „Assimilation of children‘s mother tongue includes the formation of practical speech skills, improvement of communicative forms and functions of language action (on the basis of practical mastering of means of language), and also formation of comprehension of linguistic validity which can be named linguistic development of the child” (2002, p. 53). Mastering the syntax of native language by the child is closely connected with cognitive development and development of all sides of speech-phonetic, lexical, morphological. Words, word-combinations, grammatical categories are used in syntactic 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. 64 Clinical Social Work and Health Intervention Clinical Social Work and Health Intervention Vol. 10 No. 2 2019 constructions. The study of the syntax of children‘s speech is necessary to solve the issues of communication development, since it is the syntactic structures that are necessary for speech communications. The language capability syntax includes the generation of self-expression and text. The following ideas of classical general linguists are relevant to our study: • According to Humboldt (1836) the language is a systematic body and between language and thinking there is a connection. Today this is a basic concept in modern psycholinguistics. • de Saussure (1910) developed the idea of systematicity suggested by Humboldt and introduced two terms: “parole” – the speech of individual person and “langue” – the system underlying the speech activity. • Benveniste (1970) doing a research on the connections between the language and society, says that it is impossible to describe a society, the culture of society without the description of the language. The idea about the connection between the culture and language exist for decades in psycho-linguistics and sociolinguistics. In our study we try to reflect on this idea. In Roma culture the children are treated as adults and the expectations from the children is that together with the mother tongue, they have also to learn the official language of the country and very often also another minority language, because Roma usually live next to another minority group in their country of residence. One can say that most Roma children in Europe grow up not just as bilinguals but rather as multilinguals. And to manage two or three or even sometimes more languages from very early age is not an easy task. There are two approaches to second language acquisition in the psycholinguistic literature: • The first approach is using the knowledge of the children in their L1 (first language) to investigate what is the influence of L1 into L2 (second language) performance. A number of scientists think that the mother tongue plays an important role in the process of the second language acquisition. Many bilingual children acquire their two languages sequentially (Cummins & Sayres, 1995; de Hower, 2009; Grosjean, 1982, Cenoz an Genesee, 2001, Kyuchukov, 2016). It has been proposed that for bilingual children to develop the level of language skill needed to succeed academically in their L2, they must have strong L1 skills. A large body of research shows that there are many ways in which first language skills support second language acquisition. • A second group of scientists think that the most important is the grammatical structure of the L2. It does not matter what the L1 of the children is, they always will have difficulties learning the L2. Dulay and Burt (1974) were the first to introduce the idea of universal child language learning strategies doing a research with Chinese and Spanish children learning English as L2.

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