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
