Canadian Study on Chinese Adopted Children: Lags or Gaps in their Language Development

Dr. Boris Gindis  has been studying language issues in and providing education and psychoeducational evaluations for internationally-adopted children for several years in the US.

Now, McGill University in Canada has compared internationally-adopted Chinese children in a different way than previous studies. The abstract can be found here and is pasted below:

Gauthier, K. and Genesee, F. (2011), Language Development in Internationally Adopted Children: A Special Case of Early Second Language Learning. Child Development, 82: 887–901.

“The French language development of children adopted (n = 24) from China was compared with that of control children matched for socioeconomic status, sex, and age. The children were assessed at 50 months of age, on average, and 16 months later. The initial assessment revealed that the 2 groups did not differ with respect to socioemotional adjustment or intellectual abilities. However, the adopted children’s expressive language skills were significantly lower than those of the nonadopted children at both assessments. The receptive language skills were also significantly weaker for the adopted children at the second assessment. The results are discussed in terms of possible early age-of-acquisition effects that might affect adopted children’s ability to acquire a second first language”

News Article

An article describing the study is at Study finds small language gaps in children adopted from abroad
[The Canadian Press 5/29/11 by Eric Danek]. Some excerpts are below:

“In their study, they compared the French-language skills of two sets of children: Chinese-born children adopted by Quebec families, and their Quebec-born peers raised in homes with a similar socio-economic status.

Genesee says it’s important to study kids from similar households because internationally adopted children are generally adopted into homes that should be above-average language learning environments.

He explained that adoptive parents tend to be middle and upper-middle class, are older and have no other children. Research shows that such factors favour language development, even in biological children, he said.

The decision to compare children from similar households marks a shift from previous research — which used the general population as a benchmark and concluded that Chinese-born adopted kids developed average language skills.

It took this new methodology to detect a difference.

“From most people’s point of view they’re looking quite typical,” said Genesee.

“But if you look very carefully you realize there are lags or gaps in their language development taking into account the fact that they’re being raised in these fairly enriched kinds of environments.”

The Chinese-born adopted children Genesee studied were adopted when they were between seven months and two years old.

Genesee first tested their language abilities between one-and-a-half to four years after their adoption, and then tested them again on average 16 months later.

Genesee thinks the language-learning difficulties stem from the switch from being exposed to Chinese from birth and then suddenly being exposed only to French after adoption.

“They’re not laying the foundations for (French) from birth and so even a gap of a year may influence their longterm development,” he said.

He does not believe the children’s pre-adoption experiences are at cause. Unlike some other countries, children in China are not generally sent to orphanages because of poverty or substance abuse.”

Remarks about the Actual Study

If you were to read the news article in its entirety, you may get the impression that as an AP you shouldn’t worry because most kids are on track. But you really need to look at the actual article before you understand what is really being said. The article is currently not free, but you can purchase it at the site linked to above. The following are some of our remarks about the actual study.

Previous research published in 2003, 2005, and 2007 indicate that IA children from China progress rapidly in their early language acquisition, however, studies published in 2005 and 2007 indicate that at least up to 20% of children exhibit significant language delays or difficulties or receives speech/language therapy. As a side note in some areas of the country, much of preschool-level speech and language therapy emphasizes the speech part/articulation over the language acquisition. Most research on IA children has focused on the preschool years. This study also focuses on preschool children. The researchers will be following up with these children as they age, so that will be important research to look for.

Participants in the Study

The IA children were recruited with the assistance of the adoption agency Societe Formons une Famille, Inc. in Montreal. Twenty-four girls between 41.5 months and 56 months with an average of 24 months exposure to French were included in the study. Health was measured by parent’s responses on questionnaires, which is not the best way to collect this type of data. Approximately ninety-two percent of parents considered their children in excellent or very good health.

The control group was matched to the IA children with respect to age, level of education of the parents and family income. Adoptive parents were significantly older than the control group’s parents. The original control group spent considerable more time in daycare than the IA children. The researchers actually replaced 18 of the controls in the second assessment to better match the IA children.

Assessments

The followup assessment was done about 15.6 months after the first assessment. The first assessment included 5 tests: PLS-III, EOWPVT, Peabody EVIP,Leiter-R Brief IQ, Vineland Social-Emotional Early Childhood Scales. The second assessment only included 3 of the original tests-EOWPVT, EVIP and a developmental test. CELF-R, a measure of receptive and expressive language skills was added. The assessments were in 4 sessions each lasting 90 minutes.

Results

At the initial testing, IA children scored significantly worse on the expressive scales of the PLS-III and EOWPVT and approached significance on the comprehension scales compared to the control group.

They examined the subtests closer after seeing this difference. “Between 35% and 47% of the IA children scored at least 1.25 SD below the mean of the [control] group on the tests measuring general expressive language skills and expressive vocabulary at initial and follow-up testing. Regarding receptive language abilities, approximately 26% of the IA children score at least 1.25 SD below the mean of the [control] group on the Receptive Scale of hte CELF-R at follow-up.”

“[T]he difference between the IA and [control] children on the Recalling Sentences subtest [of CELF-R]cannot be attributed only to differences in vocabulary skills. The performance on the Recalling Sentences subtest was significantly correlated with scores on the Receptive Language Scale of the CELF-R, suggesting that the IA children’s depressed performance on the Recalling Sentences subtest may be due, in part at least, to lages in their receptive morphosyntactic skills.”

Though the general health of the children was very good to excellent, some did have health issues recorded in their profiles. “[I]t does not appear that the IA children’s language development was influenced significantly by their general health.”

“[T]here is some suggestion that IA children who produced ther first words in French earlier did better on all the language measures at follow-up , except for the Formulated Sentence subtest.”

Discussion

The authors indicate that the lag in expressive language skills and not as much in receptive language skills “are consistent with” the  2007 study [Glennon, SL (2007).Predicting language outcomes for internationally adopted children. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 50,529-548.] “who found that the expressive language abilities of children adopted from Eastern Europe were less developed than their receptive language skills when they were tested at 31.26 months of age after 12-21 months of exposure to English.”

For those that still believe that a certain region of the world or country protects an internationally adopted child from certain outcomes, this is yet more evidence showing that is does NOT.

One of the most important things stated in the discussion: “Thus, extended exposure to French was not sufficient to overcome the IA children’s initial lags in expressive abilities in comparison to the [control] children and, to the contrary, their initial lags had expanded to include receptive language skills as well.”

Additionally, “Caution is called for when interpreting these results because they are based on parental reports and might be biased by parents’ perceptions of their children’s current language abilities.”

“Our language results indicate that the IA children continued to differ from the [control] children at the follow-up assessment, that they showed differences in more areas at follow-up than initially, and that more IA children showed differences on certain tests at follow-up than initially in comparison.”

Also, they share that the Abrhamsson and Hyltenstam 2009 study [Abrahamsson, N., & Hyltenstam, K. (2009). Age of acquisition and nativelikeness in a second language: Listener perception vs. linguisitic scrutiny. Language Learning, 59, 2249-306.] “that it is difficult, if not impossible, for second language learners to attain native-like levels of competence even when second language learning begins early during the preschool years.”

That is why it is a great plan that this team will be doing another “follow-up assessment of the same IA children now that they have been attending school for a number of years.”

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