Introduction: In most of the European countries if the Roma children do not speak well the official language of the country they live in, they are considered to have "psychological disorders".
Purpose. The study aims to investigate the knowledge of wh- complements and the Theory of Mind in Romani of Roma children and adults with and without disabilities.
Method. The method used is individual testing of Roma children and adults with wh-complements and The two classical Theory of Mind Tasks: unexpected content and misdisplacement. If the children and adults pass the Theory of Mind tests, they are tested also with the language test. The number of the tested children are as follows: 41 normally developing Roma children: 21 children from Turkey ( 3-6 years old), 12 Roma children from Serbia (6-8 years old) , 8 Roma children form Lithuania, (6-12 years old), 1 Roma child (9 years old with Autism) and 8 adult Roma from Bulgaria, with disabilities.
Results. The children from Turkey, Lithuania and from Serbia are also normally developing. The Turkish and Serbian Roma children are balanced bilinguals. The Lithuanian children are bilinguals, but their dominant language is Russian. The Bulgarian Roma child and the Bulgarian adults are balanced bilinguals. Result show that the Roma children from Turkey and Serbia understand the Theory of Mind tasks because, they are good in wh-complements. The Roma children from Lithuania who do not know Romani well, they can not solve the Theory of Mind tasks. Their results are similar to the results of the Roma child with Autism and Roma adults with disabilities.
Conclusions. The study shows that knowledge of Romani grammatical category - wh-question facilitates the Theory of Mind development and that helps the children to be educated better in their second language.