The loss of first language phonetic perception in adopted Koreans

Ventureyra, Valérie A.G.; Pallier, Christophe; Yoo, Hiyon

doi:10.1016/s0911-6044(03)00053-8

Cited by 218 publications

(190 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…Finally, the type of reexposure examined by Ventureyra may have been insufficient to elicit strong behavioral effects (6). In fact, reexposed IA participants actually showed significant advantages on the easiest contrast examined-a tense-aspirated contrast that is phonemic in Korean (14). Given these adoptees' relatively low amount of reexposure to Korean, this is noteworthy, as it is possible that more, or more structured, Korean exposure may have yielded stronger effects.…”

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confidence: 93%

“…Sentences in another unfamiliar language also activated similar regions in these groups. Behaviorally, Ventureyra (14) found that Korean adoptees performed similarly to French monolingual speakers on a Korean discrimination task, even after Significance Using functional MRI we examined the unconscious influence of early experience on later brain outcomes. Internationally adopted (IA) children (aged 9-17 years), who were completely separated from their birth language (Chinese) at 12.8 mo of age, on average, displayed brain activation to Chinese linguistic elements that precisely matched that of native Chinese speakers, despite the fact that IA children had no subsequent exposure to Chinese and no conscious recollection of that language.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Mapping the unconscious maintenance of a lost first language

Pierce

Klein

Chen

et al. 2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

101

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Significance Using functional MRI we examined the unconscious influence of early experience on later brain outcomes. Internationally adopted (IA) children (aged 9–17 years), who were completely separated from their birth language (Chinese) at 12.8 mo of age, on average, displayed brain activation to Chinese linguistic elements that precisely matched that of native Chinese speakers, despite the fact that IA children had no subsequent exposure to Chinese and no conscious recollection of that language. Importantly, activation differed from monolingual French speakers with no Chinese exposure, despite all participants hearing identical acoustic stimuli. The similarity between adoptees and Chinese speakers clearly illustrates that early acquired information is maintained in the brain and that early experiences unconsciously influence neural processing for years, if not indefinitely.

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confidence: 93%

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confidence: 99%

Mapping the unconscious maintenance of a lost first language

Pierce

Klein

Chen

et al. 2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

101

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In one study, adults who had been adopted from Korea to France as monolingual Korean children between ages three and eight years seemed unable to access their childhood language memory. They could neither discriminate among certain Korean speech sounds (Ventureyra, Pallier, & Yoo, 2004) nor identify Korean sentences from a series of sentences in unfamiliar languages (Pallier et al, 2003), performing just like native French speakers never exposed to Korean. Moreover, adoptees' event-related fMRI brain activation patterns revealed no signs of recognition of Korean: their patterns did not differ while listening to Korean vs. a completely unfamiliar language, and their patterns for French vs. Korean looked just like those of native French speakers (Pallier et al, 2003).…”

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confidence: 92%

Salvaging a childhood language

Knightly

et al. 2008

Journal of Memory and Language

111

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Childhood experience with a language seems to help adult learners speak it with a more native-like accent. Can analogous benefits be found beyond phonology? This study focused on adult learners of Spanish who had spoken Spanish as their native language before age 7 and only minimally, if at all, thereafter until they began to re-learn Spanish around age 14 years. They were compared with native speakers, childhood overhearers, and typical late-second-language (L2)-learners of Spanish. Both childhood speakers and overhearers spoke Spanish with a more native-like accent than typical late-L2-learners. On grammar measures, childhood speakers-although far from native-like-reliably outperformed childhood overhearers as well as typical late-L2-learners. These results suggest that while simply overhearing a language during childhood could help adult learners speak it with a more native-like phonology, speaking a language regularly during childhood could help re-learners use it with more native-like grammar as well as phonology.

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“…Their birth language, in contrast, is forgotten. If, at adoption, they could speak in that language, they quickly forget their vocabulary (36)(37)(38), and, as adults, they report no language recollection (39,40).…”

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

Early phonology revealed by international adoptees' birth language retention

Choi

Broersma

Cutler

2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Until at least 6 mo of age, infants show good discrimination for familiar phonetic contrasts (i.e., those heard in the environmental language) and contrasts that are unfamiliar. Adult-like discrimination (significantly worse for nonnative than for native contrasts) appears only later, by 9-10 mo. This has been interpreted as indicating that infants have no knowledge of phonology until vocabulary development begins, after 6 mo of age. Recently, however, word recognition has been observed before age 6 mo, apparently decoupling the vocabulary and phonology acquisition processes. Here we show that phonological acquisition is also in progress before 6 mo of age. The evidence comes from retention of birth-language knowledge in international adoptees. In the largest ever such study, we recruited 29 adult Dutch speakers who had been adopted from Korea when young and had no conscious knowledge of Korean language at all. Half were adopted at age 3-5 mo (before nativespecific discrimination develops) and half at 17 mo or older (after word learning has begun). In a short intensive training program, we observe that adoptees (compared with 29 matched controls) more rapidly learn tripartite Korean consonant distinctions without counterparts in their later-acquired Dutch, suggesting that the adoptees retained phonological knowledge about the Korean distinction. The advantage is equivalent for the younger-adopted and the olderadopted groups, and both groups not only acquire the tripartite distinction for the trained consonants but also generalize it to untrained consonants. Although infants younger than 6 mo can still discriminate unfamiliar phonetic distinctions, this finding indicates that native-language phonological knowledge is nonetheless being acquired at that age.language acquisition | adoption | phonology | language memory T o talk to others, and to understand what others say, we need to know the phonological structure of the language we are using. Phonology embraces, for instance, the single-sound contrasts that distinguish one word from another, or the sequence constraints that apply to sounds; so if we are speaking English, we need to distinguish rye from lie, and if we hear [m] followed immediately by [b], we know that they belong to different syllables, as in somebody. Neither assumption holds for all languages. Phonological knowledge is highly language-specific.It is also abstract: not so much knowledge of the sounds and words in the language, but knowledge about those sounds and words, and the rules that govern them. Such knowledge is constantly called into play in adult talking and listening. When talkers must repeat others' utterances, they repeat the sounds that are said, but do so by using their own accent, not by imitating the accent in which the sounds are said (1). If talkers are exposed to novel phoneme sequence constraints in perception, they quickly apply them in production (2). In slips of the tongue, transposed elements accommodate to the new rather than to the originally intended phonetic context, su...

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The loss of first language phonetic perception in adopted Koreans

Cited by 218 publications

References 26 publications

Mapping the unconscious maintenance of a lost first language

Mapping the unconscious maintenance of a lost first language

Salvaging a childhood language

Early phonology revealed by international adoptees' birth language retention

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