adoption

[elenan]

Just to add to the discussion. Howard Grabois and I have some data on a child
who was adopted from China to Canada in an English-speaking home at the age of
19 months (1;9), with very few productive words in Chinese. In 10 weeks, she
had a productive vocabulary of around 25 words in English. Her comprehension
vocabulary was in the neighbourhood of 100 words in English. At that point she
was no longer producing any Chinese with the Chinese-speakers that we sent to
play with her.
	At 2;6, we gave her the PPVT and she scored at the 13th percentile for her
age. We didn't have a great measure of her productive abilities at that age,
but she was certainly forming multi-word utterances.
	In short, her short-term language gains were impressive (presumably because
of her understanding of the kinds of social & communicative abilities she had,
as Liz Bates mentioned), although her longer-term language acquisition,
particularly in comprehension, was really low. Obviously with a case study, we
don't know how generalizable these results are. They do suggest that it is
*possible* for an adopted child to learn a lot of the surrounding language in
a very short period of time.

That's very little help with the original question, but perhaps of theoretical
interest....


Elena