Learning English and losing Chinese: A case study of a child adopted from China

Elena Nicoladis · Howard Grabois

78 citations0/0 files storedInternational Journal of Bilingualism

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Language Development and Disorders EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning Child and Animal Learning Development

Abstract

Studies of early language acquisition show that children focus on the language in their environment toward the end of the first year. This study concerned the acquisition of English and the loss of Chinese by a child adopted from China into an English-speaking family in Canada at the age of 17 months. As she was adopted after the age of one year, her switch to English might be expected to be slow and difficult. The child's production and comprehension of Chinese and English were observed from four weeks after her arrival. Her acquisition of English was remarkably fast, as was her loss of Chinese. These data suggest that the child's language acquisition was founded on already established social and communicative processes. Her previous exposure to Chinese may have allowed her to learn about language use in general, thus facilitating her rapid acquisition of English.

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References

1962Thought and language 1984Cross-language speech perception: Evidence for perceptual reorganization during the first year of life 2000How Children Learn the Meanings of Words 2015The Emergence of Symbols: Cognition and Communication in Infancy 1991When learning a second language means losing the first 1990Maturational Constraints on Language Development 1997The relation of input factors to lexical learning by bilingual infants 1994Developmental and stylistic variation in the composition of early vocabulary

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2009Effects of age of L2 acquisition on L1 event conceptualization patterns 2009Preserved Implicit Knowledge of a Forgotten Childhood Language 2005Language development of Chinese adoptees 18–35 months old 2017Early phonology revealed by international adoptees' birth language retention 2017Early development of abstract language knowledge: evidence from perception–production transfer of birth-language memory 2010

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