Phonological processing skills of children adopted internationally

In recent years, large numbers of children have been adopted from abroad into the United States. This has prompted an interest in understanding and improving the developmental outcomes for these children. Although a growing number of studies have investigated the early language development of children who have been adopted internationally, few have focused specifically on the phonological processing development of this group of children, even though it is widely acknowledged that phonological processing skills are important in language and literacy acquisition. The purpose of this study was to examine the phonological processing skills of a group of children who had been adopted from China into the United States.

The participants were 45 children who had been adopted from China ( M age at adoption = 13.09 months). The children were assessed between the ages of 6;10 (years;months) and 9;4. Their phonological processing skills, spoken language skills, and reading comprehension skills were assessed using norm-referenced measures.

Overall, the majority of children scored at or above the average ranges across measures of phonological awareness, phonological memory, and rapid naming. The children's reading comprehension scores were moderately to highly correlated with their phonological processing scores, but age at the time of adoption was not highly correlated with phonological processing or reading comprehension.

The findings of the current study provide a basis for an optimistic view regarding the later language and literacy development of school-age children who were internationally adopted by the age of 2 years.