Adoption

Although the adoption design is the most powerful method to disentangle nature and nurture, it has not been applied previously to developmental speech or language disorders. The present study examined the speech outcomes of 156 adopted and nonadopted children at varying risk for speech disorders based upon self-reported parental speech history. The sample consisted of four groups: (a) 16 adopted children with an affected biological parent; (b) 19 adopted children with an affected adoptive parent; (c) 31 nonadopted children with an affected natural parent; and (d) 90 low-risk adopted and nonadopted children with no parental speech disorder history. Results revealed that 25% of the children with a genetic background of speech disorder displayed questionable speech, language, or fluency skills at age 7, in comparison to 9% of the children with no known genetic history. Logistic regression analyses indicated that positive biological parental background was the best predictor of offspring affected status. The child's Full-Scale IQ and the HOME Scale of family environment were not significantly associated with speech outcome. These results provide additional evidence that genetic factors contribute importantly to the vertical transmission of some developmental speech disorders of unknown origin.

When children change cultures through adoption, they experience a transition from a birth first language to a new adoptive first language. Because adoptive families rarely speak the birth language, use of that language arrests at the time of adoption and undergoes attrition while the child learns the new adopted language. During this process, internationally adopted children have limited abilities in both languages. This makes it difficult to determine which children require speech and language services, and which will learn the new language spontaneously over time. This article reviews information on arrested language development in bilingual children and applies it to the internationally adopted child. The influence of cross-linguistic patterns of transfer and interference in infants and toddlers is explored, along with the medical and developmental risks associated with children adopted from orphanages. The primary goal of this article is to help professionals understand post-adoption language learning issues affecting internationally adopted children, as well as the impact of preadoption history on those developmental processes.

KEY WORDS: language development, adoption (child), orphanage, language attrition, bilingualism

Infants and toddlers born into one language and culture, then adopted into another, undergo a unique language learning experience. This experience is naively viewed by some as bilingual learning of English as a second language. However, internationally adopted children are not typical bilingual language learners because the birth language is rarely maintained. Language development in the birth language is arrested at the time of adoption and replaced by development of an adopted first language. These distinctive language learning issues have come to the fore because the number of international adoptions has increased rapidly over the last decade. In 1990, 7,093 international adoptions were reported. This increased to 19,237 children in the year 2001 (U.S. Department of State, 2002). Eastern Europe and China are the primary sources for children, accounting for over 60% of all international adoptions in the last 5 years (U.S. Department of State, 2001).

As the number of children adopted internationally grows, speech-language pathologists are increasingly asked to provide early intervention services. Currently, little information is available to aid in determining which children will readily develop a new adopted language and which are at risk for language learning difficulties. Compounding this dilemma is the fact that 88% of all internationally adopted children are initially raised in institutional orphanage environments (Johnson, 2000; Johnson & Dole, 1999). Children come from countries in which personal income is low, nutrition is poor, and access to health care is substandard (Johnson & Dole). The institutional setting, combined with health and nutritional risk factors, creates a less-than-optimal environment for early development, regardless of the birth country of the child.

In order to make appropriate clinical decisions, speech-language pathologists need to understand how internationally adopted infants and toddlers learn language, and the effect