Acquisition of English vocabulary by young Chinese adoptees

Abstract

The number of orphaned and abandoned children adopted by US citizens from China has surpassed that from any other country in the last couple of years (US State Department Statistics, 2003). This is due, in part, to China's reputation for placing ‘healthy’ children who are very young (under a year or slightly older). The question we address in this paper is how children, adopted from between seven and eleven months of age, fare in their acquisition of English vocabulary given months of Chinese, rather than English, language exposure and a brief history of institutionalization. By age two to two-and-a-half, the majority of the children we have been following showed no evidence of delay in their acquisition of expressive English vocabulary with some having larger vocabularies than is typical for their native-born English-speaking peers.