Language abilities of internationally adopted children from China during the early school years: Evidence for early age effects?

Abstract

<jats:title>ABSTRACT</jats:title><jats:p>We 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.</jats:p>

Evaluation of Three Proposed Markers for Language Impairment in English: A Meta-Analysis of Diagnostic Accuracy Studies

“…Poor sentence repetition may reflect weaknesses in diverse aspects of lexical and/or morphosyntactic skills, making it perhaps better suited than the other two markers to identification of affected individuals with diverse areas of weakness. However, it is not clear to what extent differences in memory skills (Riches, 2012) and language exposure (Delcenserie, Genesee, & Gauthier, 2013) may significantly affect performance on sentence repetition tasks. Thus, although many individuals with LI are likely to perform poorly on marker measures, so may substantial numbers of unaffected individuals for reasons other than presence of LI.…”

A Longitudinal Study of Language and Speech in Children Who Were Internationally Adopted at Different Ages

“…Other researchers have noted subtle differences in the syntactic and grammatical abilities of internationally adopted children who are otherwise proficient in their new language (Delcenserie et al, 2013;Gauthier et al, 2012). French Canadian children who were adopted from China performed as well as age-matched controls on expressive measures of tense morphology and lexical diversity.…”

“…However, their use of clitics, direct object pronouns that refer back to previously noted objects or persons, was problematic. These French Canadian adoptees had been exposed to the French language for 6 to 7 years, yet they used fewer clitics than nonadopted controls and made more errors when clitics were attempted (Delcenserie et al, 2013). At this time, the reason for these difficulties is not clear.…”

“…However, by school age, language tasks that involve memory and executive functions such as following complex directions are a noted area of relative weakness for some internationally adopted children whose language performance in all other areas is average (Desmarais, Roeber, Smith, & Pollak, 2012;Eigsti et al, 2011). In addition, complex syntactic and grammatical expressive forms are more difficult for internationally adopted children to use proficiently (Delcenserie, Genesee, & Gauthier, 2013;Gauthier, Genesee, & Kasparian, 2012).…”

Internationally Adopted Children in the Early School Years: Relative Strengths and Weaknesses in Language Abilities

“…The grammatical abilities of French Canadian children who were adopted from China were tested over time in a series of tasks (Delcenserie, Genesee, & Gauthier, 2012;Gauthier, Genesee, & Kasparian, 2011). That is, abilities in some areas of language develop better or develop more slowly, when compared with abilities in other language areas.…”