Longitudinal language development data were collected on 130 infants and toddlers adopted from Eastern Europe. The children were followed by means of parent surveys from the age at adoption up through age 36–40 months. The surveys collected data on expressive vocabulary growth, mean length of the three longest utterances, and development of four bound grammatical morphemes. Additional language data were collected using a modified version of the Rossetti Infant-Toddler Language Scale (1990). A multivariate factor analysis found no significant correlation between preadoption medical and developmental risk factors and eventual language development outcomes. The majority of children acquired English using the same developmental trajectories as nonadopted peers. By age 36–40 months, children adopted at younger ages had fully caught up to English language norms. Children adopted at older ages lagged behind, with the length of delay related to age at adoption. On the basis of these data, clinical guidelines are provided for assessing and treating speech and language disorders in internationally adopted children.

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.

This study followed a cohort of 46 school-age children adopted from Eastern Europe who were originally studied by Glennen and Masters up through age 2 or 3. Five years later, the children were 6 to 9 years of age. Data on their school-age abilities were collected through surveys of parents and teachers. Parents indicated that 17.4% of the children were receiving classroom accommodations or special education programs and 54.5% had one or more diagnoses. The most common diagnosis was attention deficit disorder/attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADD/ADHD), occurring in 25% of the children, primarily boys. Learning disability and speech language impairment were each noted in 11.4% of the children. Language and Social Skill profiles on the Children's Communication Checklist-2 and Social Skills Rating Scale (SSRS) indicated that structural and meaning-based language abilities were areas of strength. Measures of pragmatic use of language (i.e., Use of Context, Social Relations, Nonverbal Communication) were relative weaknesses. Behavior profiles on the SSRS indicated higher than average levels of hyperactivity. The profile of Language and Social Skills strengths and weaknesses was similar to patterns observed in children with ADD/ADHD. Age of adoption was not predictive of school-age outcomes on these measures, but the children's expressive vocabulary when they were 2 to 3 years of age predicted SSRS outcomes for Social Skills and Problem Behaviors.

Newly adopted children with delays on prelinguistic and vocabulary comprehension measures were highly likely to have slow language development at age 2. Initial assessments of these abilities should be used to make early intervention decisions.

In the November 2002 issue of AJLSP , the article, "Typical and Atypical Language Development in Infants and Toddlers Adopted From Eastern Europe," by Sharon Glennen and M. Gay Masters, contained errors in Table 3 (p. 105). Under the heading Expressive Vocabulary , the +/– SD values for ages 22–24 months should have been 8.6–126.66 and the values for ages 25–27 months should have been 12.25–110.93 . We regret any inconvenience or confusion that this misprint may have caused.