The French language development of children adopted (n=24) from China was compared with that of control children matched for socioeconomic status, sex, and age. The children were assessed at 50 months of age, on average, and 16 months later. The initial assessment revealed that the 2 groups did not differ with respect to socioemotional adjustment or intellectual abilities. However, the adopted children's expressive language skills were significantly lower than those of the nonadopted children at both assessments. The receptive language skills were also significantly weaker for the adopted children at the second assessment. The results are discussed in terms of possible early age-of-acquisition effects that might affect adopted children's ability to acquire a second first language.

ABSTRACTWe assessed the language, cognitive, and socioemotional abilities of 27 internationally adopted children from China, adopted by French-speaking parents, 12 of whom had been assessed previously by Gauthier and Genesee. The children were on average 7 years, 10 months old and were matched to nonadopted monolingual French-speaking children on age, gender, and socioeconomic status. Although there were no significant differences between the groups with respect to socioemotional and cognitive development, the adoptees scored significantly lower than the controls on measures of receptive grammar, expressive vocabulary, word definitions, and sentence recall, findings that were similar to those reported by Gauthier and Genesee. Analyses of correlations between the adopted children's language test results and their age at adoption, length of exposure to the adoption language, health, and other developmental problems revealed relatively few significant associations. In contrast, analyses of the relationship between their language test scores and their performance on the recalling sentences subtest suggest a link between performance on these two tests. We speculate on the role that performance on sentence recall might play in mediating differences in language outcomes between the two groups of children.

The present study examined the language development of children adopted from China to examine possible early age effects with respect to their use of complement clitics, lexical diversity and verb morphology. We focused on these aspects of French because they distinguish second language learners of French and native French-speaking children with language impairment from children learning French as a native language and, in the case of object clitics and certain verb tenses, are relatively late to emerge in native speakers. Thus, it might be expected that they would be susceptible to the delayed onset of acquisition of French experienced by internationally adopted children. Language samples of twelve adopted children from 3;6 to 4;8 living in French-speaking families were analyzed and compared to those of non-adopted monolingual French-speaking children of the same age, sex and socio-economic status. The adopted and control children had similar levels of socio-emotional adjustment and non-verbal intellectual abilities. The adopted children exhibited accelerated language development in general, and there were no significant differences between the internationally adopted and control children with respect to lexical diversity and verb tense. However, the adopted children made significantly more errors using complement clitics, and in particular object clitics, compared to the non-adopted children. The results are discussed in terms of possible effects related to delayed age of acquisition of French.

This study presents findings on patterns of communication between internationally adopted children and their mothers in order to better understand the nature of these interactions and their influence on language learning. We examined maternal language use and joint attention behaviors of mothers and their children in 21 mother-child pairs: 10 pairs included children adopted from China living in francophone families, and 11 included francophone children living with their biological families; all were matched for socioeconomic status, sex, and age. The children were, on average, 15 months of age at initial testing when they were video-taped with their mothers for purposes of describing the mothers' language use and the mothers' and children's joint attention behaviors. Vocabulary development was assessed at 15 and again at 20 months of age using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory. The results support the conclusion that adoptive mothers play an active role in promoting and maintaining joint attention and that the redirecting style they used the most and that correlated with their children's later vocabulary development contrasts with the following style that correlates with vocabulary development in nonadopted children raised in mainstream North American families.

Language use and joint attention (JA) strategies were examined during interactions between francophone mothers and fathers and either their birth children (n = 10) or their internationally adopted children from China (n = 8), once when the children were 15 months old and again at 20 months, on average. Results showed that mothers engaged in more JA episodes and tended to talk more with their children than did fathers; however, this was influenced by the language-learning situation of the child. Specifically, the adoptive parents engaged more with their children than did the birth parents, and the behaviors of the internationally adopted mothers and fathers were more similar to each other than to those of the birth parents, arguably to support their children's unique language-learning situation. However, in contrast to a previous study that examined JA with adoptive mothers, the adoptive fathers' interaction styles with their children at 15 months were not related to children's vocabularies at 20 months as has been observed for mothers.It is becoming increasingly evident that the nature and quantity of input children are exposed to during early language acquisition can play an important role in their language development and even ultimate attainment (e.g., Hoff, 2006). In particular, it has been found that input during episodes of joint attention (JA) between children and their parents plays a role in children's early language learning (e.g.,