studies on

[Coreda at aol.com]

On the subject of a Chinese child changing languages:

Although this is only an anecdote, I did want to summarize a case known to
me.

A little girl (23 months) recently adopted from China, (8 weeks ago at 21
months), was reported to have little expressive language in her home
language, Shanghainese.  She has had 8 weeks of English exposure and has
about 30 words now.  She requests combining the ASL sign for "more" with the
verbal label of the item she wants.  She acquires new words daily and is
progressing in the way that many monolingual English-speaking children do,
with high frequency words first, as well as some less common early words that
must be more common in the house, like "dolphin."  Favorite initial sounds
include /b/ and /n/, "bye-bye" "night-night" and so on, though there are
other sounds as well.

I'm hoping to look at many more case studies, but it does seem that children
who shift languages go right on acquiring language, and there may be another
reason that a child who is here for 9 months is using little language.

Cynthia Core
Doctoral Candidate
University of Florida
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/info-childes/attachments/20010516/acabb5d5/attachment.htm>