Narratives reflecting Theory of Mind among bilingual Lyuli children of Uzbekistan

Abstract

This is the first known study of the socio-cognitive development of Lyuli children, a Roma-type group living in Bukhara in Uzbekistan. The research was conducted in schools in Bukhara serving both Lyuli children and Uzbek children, both of whom are multi-lingual but whose sociolinguistic circumstances are somewhat different. There has been less cross-cultural work on later stages of Theory of Mind development, in which children have to make inferences about the mental states of characters in a complex narrative. The research here shows that the children from both groups do remarkably well on these tasks, and their multilingualism is hypothesized to be the source of their success relative to other children studied with similar narratives.

Keywords

• uzbekistan
• uzbek
• lyuli
• children
• second order false belief
• theory of mind
• multilingualism
• roma