Language Development in Preschool-Age Children Adopted From China

Roberts, Jenny; Pollock, Karen; Krakow, Rena A.; Price, Johanna R.; Fulmer, Kathleen; Wang, Paul P.

doi:10.1044/1092-4388(2005/008)

Cited by 75 publications

(93 citation statements)

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“…But we know almost nothing about how they get there. While a number of researchers have studied language development in children adopted as infants or toddlers (see e.g., Glennen & Masters, 2002;Roberts, Pollock, Krakow, Price, Fulmer & Wang, 2005;Pollock, 2005), there is little work on acquisition in children who were adopted after 30 months.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Disentangling the effects of cognitive development and linguistic expertise: A longitudinal study of the acquisition of English in internationally-adopted children

Snedeker

Geren

Shafto

2012

Cognitive Psychology

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Early language development is characterized by predictable changes in the words children produce and the complexity of their utterances. In infants these changes could reflect increasing linguistic expertise or cognitive maturation and development. To disentangle these factors, we compared the acquisition of English in internationally-adopted preschoolers and internationallyadopted infants. Parental reports and speech samples were collected for one year. Both groups showed the qualitative shifts that characterize first-language acquisition. Initially, they produced single-word utterances consisting mostly of nouns and social words. The appearance of verbs, adjectives and multiword utterances was predicted by vocabulary size in both groups.Preschoolers did learn some words at an earlier stage than infants, specifically words referring to the past or future and adjectives describing behavior and internal states. These findings suggest that cognitive development plays little role in the shift from referential terms to predicates but may constrain children's ability to learn some abstract words.

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confidence: 99%

Disentangling the effects of cognitive development and linguistic expertise: A longitudinal study of the acquisition of English in internationally-adopted children

Snedeker

Geren

Shafto

2012

Cognitive Psychology

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“…The evidence comes from birth language retention by individuals born in one country but adopted at an early age into another country with another language. These international adoptees rapidly acquire the new language they are exposed to (32,33); after approximately 1 y, they typically command it as well as children who have had only input in that language (34,35). Their birth language, in contrast, is forgotten.…”

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

Early phonology revealed by international adoptees' birth language retention

Choi

Broersma

Cutler

2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Until at least 6 mo of age, infants show good discrimination for familiar phonetic contrasts (i.e., those heard in the environmental language) and contrasts that are unfamiliar. Adult-like discrimination (significantly worse for nonnative than for native contrasts) appears only later, by 9-10 mo. This has been interpreted as indicating that infants have no knowledge of phonology until vocabulary development begins, after 6 mo of age. Recently, however, word recognition has been observed before age 6 mo, apparently decoupling the vocabulary and phonology acquisition processes. Here we show that phonological acquisition is also in progress before 6 mo of age. The evidence comes from retention of birth-language knowledge in international adoptees. In the largest ever such study, we recruited 29 adult Dutch speakers who had been adopted from Korea when young and had no conscious knowledge of Korean language at all. Half were adopted at age 3-5 mo (before nativespecific discrimination develops) and half at 17 mo or older (after word learning has begun). In a short intensive training program, we observe that adoptees (compared with 29 matched controls) more rapidly learn tripartite Korean consonant distinctions without counterparts in their later-acquired Dutch, suggesting that the adoptees retained phonological knowledge about the Korean distinction. The advantage is equivalent for the younger-adopted and the olderadopted groups, and both groups not only acquire the tripartite distinction for the trained consonants but also generalize it to untrained consonants. Although infants younger than 6 mo can still discriminate unfamiliar phonetic distinctions, this finding indicates that native-language phonological knowledge is nonetheless being acquired at that age.language acquisition | adoption | phonology | language memory T o talk to others, and to understand what others say, we need to know the phonological structure of the language we are using. Phonology embraces, for instance, the single-sound contrasts that distinguish one word from another, or the sequence constraints that apply to sounds; so if we are speaking English, we need to distinguish rye from lie, and if we hear [m] followed immediately by [b], we know that they belong to different syllables, as in somebody. Neither assumption holds for all languages. Phonological knowledge is highly language-specific.It is also abstract: not so much knowledge of the sounds and words in the language, but knowledge about those sounds and words, and the rules that govern them. Such knowledge is constantly called into play in adult talking and listening. When talkers must repeat others' utterances, they repeat the sounds that are said, but do so by using their own accent, not by imitating the accent in which the sounds are said (1). If talkers are exposed to novel phoneme sequence constraints in perception, they quickly apply them in production (2). In slips of the tongue, transposed elements accommodate to the new rather than to the originally intended phonetic context, su...

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“…Recent years have seen the rising number of international adoptions around the world, with China being the number one source of children adopted into the USA. Many of the adoptees from China into American families leave their homeland in infancy, before age two or three, and have to acquire a 'second first language' (Pollock, Price & Fulmer, 2003;Roberts et al, 2005). In monolingual Englishspeaking homes, it is likely that these children's first language, Chinese, will gradually be lost while English takes over as their first language (Nicoladis & Grabois, 2002).…”

Section: Immigrant and Adopted Childrenmentioning

confidence: 99%

The acquisition of Chinese in bilingual and multilingual contexts

Yip

Matthews

2010

International Journal of Bilingualism

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Significance of the acquisition of Chinese in bilingual and multilingual contextsThe study of how children acquire two or more languages is of both theoretical and practical significance. We shall discuss the theoretical significance of the acquisition of Chinese in bilingual and multilingual contexts from a typological perspective followed by its practical significance in informing parents and educators of how to nurture bilingualism, especially in immigrant and adopted children.A major variable in bilingual development involves the pairing of target languages. Among the many possible permutations, some language pairs are typologically and/or genetically distant, while others are closer. By extending the database from pairing English and European languages to typologically unrelated languages with very different structures such as Chinese languages, childhood bilingualism will be better understood. Salient properties of Chinese such as lexical tone, topic prominence, word order, classifiers and null arguments raise new possibilities for interaction between a child's developing linguistic systems. We shall discuss each of these properties in turn. The pairing of a tonal language with a non-tonal one raises new questions such as the interaction between tone and intonation. Case studies of Chinese-English bilingual children may be used to address questions about the development of tone and intonation, such as: Is word stress realized as high tone? And how does sentence intonation affect the realization of tone? In a pioneering study, Light (1977) discussed some striking features of his daughter Claire's 'increasingly Anglicized' Cantonese that were argued to reflect the influence of English in her new linguistic environment upon her arrival in the USA at 16 months. The shift from Cantonese dominance to English dominance in Claire produced anomalies such as 'disintegration' of the Cantonese tonal system with Cantonese sentences taking on an English intonation pattern.Chinese languages as target languages are of ever increasing interest to language acquisition researchers, and not simply because they are spoken by more than a quarter of the world's population. They are also intrinsically of great linguistic interest because of their genetic and typological distance from Indo-European languages. A well-known typological characteristic of Chinese is topic-prominence, which contrasts with subject-prominence in languages such as English (Li & Thompson, 1976;Shi, 2000). The acquisition of topic prominence and related structures in Chinese has been investigated in adult second language acquisition (SLA: see Jin, 1994;Yip, 1995;Yuan, 1995) but awaits investigation in bilingual acquisition. Chinese languages also exhibit a unique combination of word orders (Dryer, 2003). For example, only Chinese languages combine SVO word order with relative clauses preceding the noun; when this property is transferred to English in bilingual acquisition, it results in prenominal relatives as in example (1) from Yip and Matthews (2007b): 1(...

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Language Development in Preschool-Age Children Adopted From China

Cited by 75 publications

References 58 publications

Disentangling the effects of cognitive development and linguistic expertise: A longitudinal study of the acquisition of English in internationally-adopted children

Disentangling the effects of cognitive development and linguistic expertise: A longitudinal study of the acquisition of English in internationally-adopted children

Early phonology revealed by international adoptees' birth language retention

The acquisition of Chinese in bilingual and multilingual contexts

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