Language Acquisition in Internationally Adopted Children

每年都有成千上万的儿童被国际上的美国家庭收养。像婴儿一样，这些孩子必须通过听、玩和观察周围发生的事情来学习一门语言。然而，这些孩子在一个关键方面与婴儿不同——他们要大得多，而且可能在认知上更成熟。在美国国家科学基金会的支持下，Jesse Snedeker博士将通过收集父母的报告和分析孩子们的语言样本来比较被收养的孩子和婴儿是如何学习英语的。当婴儿学习说话时，他们会经历一系列可预测的阶段。例如，在他们开始组合单词之前，他们通常会产生几个月的单个单词。这个项目的科学目标是发现被收养的学龄前儿童是否也经历了同样的阶段。这将有助于我们理解认知发展和成熟在塑造早期语言发展中的作用。该项目将产生三种更广泛的影响。首先，它将为本科生和研究生提供研究机会和培训。其次，本项目将使父母和临床医生更清楚地了解国际收养儿童的典型语言发展过程，这可能会减少不必要的焦虑，并有助于早期识别语言障碍。最后，研究这一群体学习语言的条件可能有助于我们理解和促进其他群体儿童的第二语言学习

Every year thousands of children are internationally adopted into American families. Like infants these children must learn a language by listening, playing and watching what happens around them. However, these children differ from infants in one critical respect-they are much older and presumably more cognitively mature. With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Jesse Snedeker will compare how adopted children and infants learn English by collecting parental reports and analyzing samples of the children's speech. When infants learn to speak, they go through a predictable series of stages. For example, they usually produce single words for months before they begin combining words. The scientific goal of this project is to find out whether adopted preschoolers go through the same stages. This will help us understand the role of cognitive development and maturation in shaping early language development.This project will have three kinds of broader impacts. First, it will provide research opportunities and training for undergraduate and graduate students. Second, this project will give parents and clinicians a clearer picture of the typical course of language development in internationally-adopted children, which may reduce unnecessary anxiety and aid in the early identification of language disorders. Finally, examining the conditions in which language is learned in this population may help us to understand and foster second-language learning in other groups of children