Language and cognitive outcomes in internationally adopted children

Abstract

This study focuses on the association between language skills and core cognitive processes relative to the duration of institutionalization in children adopted from orphanages abroad. Participants in the adoptive group (n = 46) had arrived in the United States between the ages of 2 and 84 months (mean = 24 months), and had been living in the United States for 1-9 years. Drawing on both experimental and standardized assessments, language skills of the international adoptees differed as a function of length of time spent in an institution and from those of 24 nonadopted controls. Top-down cognitive assessments including measures of explicit memory and cognitive control differed between adopted and nonadopted children, yet differences between groups in bottom-up implicit learning processes were unremarkable. Based on the present findings, we propose a speculative model linking language and cognitive changes to underlying neural circuitry alterations that reflect the impact of chronic stress, due to adoptees' experience of noncontingent, nonindividualized caregiving. Thus, the present study provides support for a relationship between domain-general cognitive processes and language acquisition, and describes a potential mechanism by which language skills are affected by institutionalization.

Economically Deprived and Marginalized Scholars: Their Lifestyles, Experiences, Challenges and Aspirations

“…Roberts, Pollock, and Krakow (2005) later investigated whether Chinese adoptees who had exhibited language delays in an earlier study would "catch up" (2005, p. 76) with their adopted peers after an additional two years of English language exposure. Although more than half of the children did show significant improvement in speech and language skills in the later study, all of the children who had initially exhibited language delays continued to lag behind their adopted peers [3]. …”

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

“…Children adopted at younger ages tend to have better language outcomes than children adopted at older ages; however, the strength of this association varies. Some researchers found minimal to no association between age of adoption and language (Glennen, 2007;Glennen & Bright, 2005;Scott, Roberts, & Glennen, 2011;Welsh & Viana, 2012), whereas others found moderate to strong correlations in some or all language areas (Croft et al, 2007;Eigsti, Weitzman, Schuh, DeMarchena, & Casey, 2011;Gauthier & Genesee, 2011;Jacobs, Miller, & Tirella, 2010;Roberts et al, 2005;Scott, et al, 2008;Windsor, Glaze, Koga, & the Bucharest Early Intervention Project Core Group, 2007). Differences in subject selection criteria and data analysis might account for some of this variability and will be discussed in the next sections.…”

“…Further, internationally adopted children continue to have average language and speech performance at school age (Dalen & Rygvold, 2006;Schoenbrodt, Carran, & Preis, 2007;Scott, et al, 2008;Scott, Pollock, Roberts, & Krakow, 2013). 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).…”

“…When their children were school age, parents reported that 59% of Eastern European adoptees and 64% of Chinese adoptees received some type of educational tutoring or therapeutic support to succeed in school (Glennen & Bright, 2005;Scott et al, 2008) with 55% to 62% identified by parents as having speech, language, or learning disabilities (Beverly, McGuiness, & Blanton, 2008;Hough & Kaczmarek, 2011). However, when school-age internationally adopted children are assessed directly, the percentage of children who score 1 standard deviation below the mean on language tests ranges from 5% to 25% (Eigsti et al, 2011;Hough & Kaczmarek, 2011;Scott et al, 2008). This mismatch between children's skills and parent's expectations leads to a high number of referrals for speech and language evaluations, especially during the transition period when the children cannot be validly assessed using norm-referenced measures (Glennen & Masters, 2002;Mason & Narad, 2005).…”

“…Some studies include any internationally adopted child who has been home a minimum length of time, sometimes 1 year (Eigsti et al, 2011;Schoenbrodt et al, 2007), more typically 2 years (Gauthier & Genessee, 2011;Hough & Kaczmarek, 2011;Jacobs et al, 2010;Roberts et al, 2005). Two years of language exposure might be adequate to reach age-level competence for a child adopted at 12 months of age, but only marginally adequate for a child adopted at age 3, and completely inappropriate for a child adopted at age 6.…”