Phonological processing skills of children adopted internationally

Oral and Written Language Abilities of School-Age Internationally Adopted Children from Eastern Europe

PURPOSE

Children adopted from Eastern Europe were assessed at ages 6 to 7 years and results were compared to the same children when they were 8 years. Patterns of relative strengths and weaknesses in language, verbal memory and literacy were analyzed. Variables that predicted reading and writing were determined.

METHOD

Children adopted from Eastern Europe between 1;0 and 4;11 years of age were assessed at ages 6 to 7 years and age 8 years on a variety of tests that measured language, verbal memory and literacy. Results were compared across ages, and language, verbal memory and literacy domains.

RESULTS

Group means for all measures fell within the average range at both ages. The children's scores were not significantly different from test norms except for measures of rapid naming and number repetition. However, a larger than expected percentage of children scored -1SD below the mean on decontextualized measures of verbal working memory and reading fluency. At age 8 years 24% of children received speech language therapy services and 26% had repeated a grade level. Vocabulary, expressive syntax, verbal short-term memory and writing were areas of relative strength. Higher level vocabulary knowledge was strongly correlated with all literacy measures.

CONCLUSION

As a group, Eastern European adoptees scored average on measures of language and literacy at 6 or 7 years and again at age 8 years. However, 26% of the children had repeated a grade and 24% were still receiving speech and language services. Vocabulary was an area of strength reflecting the children's enriched adopted home environments. In-depth knowledge of vocabulary was the best predictor of reading and writing. Some aspects of working memory were a strength but others were not. Rapid naming was also a weakness.

Asymmetric memory for birth language perception versus production in young international adoptees

Adults who as children were adopted into a different linguistic community retain knowledge of their birth language. The possession (without awareness) of such knowledge is known to facilitate the (re)learning of birth-language speech patterns; this perceptual learning predicts such adults' production success as well, indicating that the retained linguistic knowledge is abstract in nature. Adoptees' acquisition of their adopted language is fast and complete; birth-language mastery disappears rapidly, although this latter process has been little studied. Here, 46 international adoptees from China aged four to 10 years, with Dutch as their new language, plus 47 matched non-adopted Dutch-native controls and 40 matched non-adopted Chinese controls, undertook across a two-week period 10 blocks of training in perceptually identifying Chinese speech contrasts (one segmental, one tonal) which were unlike any Dutch contrasts. Chinese controls easily accomplished all these tasks. The same participants also provided speech production data in an imitation task. In perception, adoptees and Dutch controls scored equivalently poorly at the outset of training; with training, the adoptees significantly improved while the Dutch controls did not. In production, adoptees' imitations both before and after training could be better identified, and received higher goodness ratings, than those of Dutch controls. The perception results confirm that birth-language knowledge is stored and can facilitate re-learning in post-adoption childhood; the production results suggest that although processing of phonological category detail appears to depend on access to the stored knowledge, general articulatory dimensions can at this age also still be remembered, and may facilitate spoken imitation.

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

Purpose

The author followed 56 internationally adopted children during the first 3 years after adoption to determine how and when they reached age-expected language proficiency in Standard American English. The influence of age of adoption was measured, along with the relationship between early and later language and speech outcomes.

Method

Children adopted from Eastern Europe at ages 12 months to 4 years, 11 months, were assessed 5 times across 3 years. Norm-referenced measures of receptive and expressive language and articulation were compared over time. In addition, mean length of utterance (MLU) was measured.

Results

Across all children, receptive language reached age-expected levels more quickly than expressive language. Children adopted at ages 1 and 2 “caught up” more quickly than children adopted at ages 3 and 4. Three years after adoption, there was no difference in test scores across age of adoption groups, and the percentage of children with language or speech delays matched population estimates. MLU was within the average range 3 years after adoption but significantly lower than other language test scores.

Conclusions

Three years after adoption, age of adoption did not influence language or speech outcomes, and most children reached age-expected language levels. Expressive syntax as measured by MLU was an area of relative weakness.