Language development of Chinese adoptees 18-35 months old

In this study, we investigated the expressive language development of 186 18-35 months old Chinese girls adopted into American families. The adoptees were adopted between 3 and 25 months (M = 11.0, S.D. = 3.1) and had lived in the adoptive families for 3-27 months (M = 16.2, S.D. = 5.8) at the time of the study. The adoptive mothers provided information on the adoptees' pre- and post-adoption experiences, behavioral-emotional problems, and spontaneously uttered words and phrases. Cross-sectional data indicated that the adoptees experienced a full catch up after living in the adoptive families for an average of about 16 months. After that, the adoptees' language level surpassed the U.S. norms for the same age group. Findings also suggested that the adoptees' current age and age at adoption were associated with vocabulary size, while only age at adoption was a significant predictor of average phrase length. Pre-adoption experiences and current family demographics were not associated with the adoptees' vocabulary size or average phrase length. The adoptees' externalizing problems were negatively and weakly correlated with their phrase length.