Adopted children from China

[Jennifer Roberts]

In response to the recent questions about whether there is any research being done on adopted children from China, Rena Krakow, of Temple University, and Paul Wang, of Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and I  have been investigating the language development of a 2 groups of adopted children for the past 6 months.  So far, the results of one of our studies, conducted in collaboration with Karen Pollock of Memphis State University, indicates remarkably good English language skills in a group of 3-8 year old children, average or above average in most areas.  All of the children have been exposed to English for at least 2 years, and some for substantially longer.  There is a smaller group of children who score one to two standard deviations below the mean on a variety of standardized tests.  These children are among the youngest studied.  Interestingly, their profiles resemble that of children typically diagnosed with SLI, including difficulties with morphosyntax and sentence repetition.  At this preliminary point, we believe this reflects a normal delay in the acquisition of a new "second" language, and we intend to follow these children for an additional year to see how these problems resolve.

In a second study of younger children aged 16-26 months, we have found considerable variation in lexical acquisition using parent-report measures of vocabulary, with some of the children performing much like native-born children, and others showing delays.  Of considerable interest is the variation seen in a subset of 6 children, all adopted from the same orphanage on  the same date and at approximately the same age.  The six children are now all two years old.   Three of these children are showing very typical vocabulary development, whereas three others are significantly delayed.  We are examining a number of factors to try and identify the sources of variation in the sub-group and in the group as whole.  Overall, we feel that the results of these studies will be a significant addition to the literature on the language status of internationally adopted children, and represent a much more positive outcome than that which has been reported previously about some internationally adopted children.  Recent research conducted by Sharon Glennen of Towson University also finds primarily positive outcomes in a group of children adopted from Eastern European countries. 

Jenny
________________________________
Jenny Roberts, Ph.D.
Department of Communication Sciences
Temple University

phone: (215)-204-1871
fax: (215) 204-5954
e-mail: jrober05 at astro.temple.edu

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