Language development in internationally-adopted children acquiring French as a "second first language"

Investigating the development of internationally-adopted (IA) children makes it possible to examine how early life experiences might affect later development and, in particular, the extent to which the language faculty is flexible and can adapt to a new language after interruption in acquisition of the birth language. The general purpose of the present research program was to study the ability of IA children to acquire their "second first language" and to identify factors that might favor or impede the development of their new language, French in the case of the studies presented in this thesis. In contrast with other studies, except for Cohen, Lojkasek, Zadeh, Pugliese and Kiefer (2008), variables that have been shown to have an impact on language development, namely familial socio-economic status, and sex, were carefully controlled in the present studies. To our knowledge, these are the first studies to examine the acquisition of French in IA children. Study 1 is a longitudinal study in which the language skills, non-verbal intelligence, socio-emotional adjustment, and general health of Chinese-born children adopted into Canadian French-speaking families were compared to those of matched non-adopted monolingual French-speaking children. The children were assessed a first time at 4 years of age, on average, and again 16 months later. They had been in their adoptive families for 3 and 4 years, on average, respectively. The results of the initial assessment showed that the two groups did not differ with respect to socio-emotional adjustment or non-verbal intelligence. Moreover, the IA children performed in the average range on most language tests when compared to test norms, suggesting resiliency in their language acquisition abilities. However, an important percentage of IA children performed significantly below the norms on the Recalling Sentences subtest of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-Revised. Also, as a group, the IA children performed significantly lower than their non-adopted peers particularly on expressive language tests (lexical and grammatical). To better characterize the language abilities of the IA children, spontaneous language samples of a subgroup of the IA children from Study 1 were analyzed in detail in Study 2. Results of Study 2 indicated that the IA children had a remarkable capacity to catch-up to their non-adopted peers with respect to diverse features of language, such as mean length of utterance, lexical diversity, and tense morphology; but, they made significantly more errors with complement clitics. Study 3 was undertaken in order to examine IA children's very early communicative and language development and the nature of adoptive mothers' language input and attention regulation strategies with their adoptive children soon after adoption. The results support the conclusion that adoptive mothers play an active role in promoting and maintaining joint attention with their adopted children and that the interaction strategy they use most, redirecting their child's attentional focus, contrasts with what has been shown to be effective for biological children raised in Western cultures (Baldwin, 1991; Tomasello & Farrar, 1986) but was, nevertheless positively associated with the internationally-adopted children's later lexical development. Overall, the findings suggest that IA children exhibited accelerated development in diverse domains of their second first language; but, however, there were significant differences in specific aspects of their language development in comparison to matched control children that suggest the possibility of very early age of acquisition effects.

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