Abstract
Early language development is characterized by predictable changes in the words children produce and the complexity of their utterances. In infants, these changes could reflect increasing linguistic expertise or cognitive maturation and development. To disentangle these factors, we compared the acquisition of English in internationally-adopted preschoolers and internationally-adopted infants. Parental reports and speech samples were collected for 1year. Both groups showed the qualitative shifts that characterize first-language acquisition. Initially, they produced single-word utterances consisting mostly of nouns and social words. The appearance of verbs, adjectives and multiword utterances was predicted by vocabulary size in both groups. Preschoolers did learn some words at an earlier stage than infants, specifically words referring to the past or future and adjectives describing behavior and internal states. These findings suggest that cognitive development plays little role in the shift from referential terms to predicates but may constrain children’s ability to learn some abstract words.
Highlights
Language production can be characterized as a series of roadblocks that are gradually removed
We focus on two qualitative changes that typically occur between 12 and 30 months of age: 1) the systematic shift in the composition of the child’s lexicon from concrete nouns to more abstract words such as verbs, adjectives and grammatical function words and 2) the end of the one-word stage and the emergence of combinatorial speech
We demonstrated that the Communicative Development Inventory 2 (CDI-2) is a valid assessment of language development in internationally-adopted preschoolers by documenting parallel relations between the CDI-2 and transcript measures in both populations
Summary
Language production can be characterized as a series of roadblocks that are gradually removed. International adoption could provide a way to explore the role that cognitive development and maturation play in shaping the course of first language acquisition, by allowing us to see how acquisition proceeds when these roadblocks have been removed Such a tool would be useful for distinguishing between two broad classes of hypotheses about qualitative changes during language acquisition: 1) Developmental Hypotheses: Theories of this kind attribute the order of acquisition or the emergence of new abilities to changes in the learner that are independent of her experience with a given language. Immaturity constrains language acquisition, limiting the kinds of words that a child can learn, the kinds of utterances she can produce or the kinds of representations she can create When these limitations are removed, by biological maturation or cognitive development, new linguistic abilities can emerge
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