RUI: The Role of Childhood Language Memory in Adult Language Learning: Korean Adoptees Learning Korean as Adults

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).

Extensive research has demonstrated that early linguistic experience is critical for achieving native-like proficiency in a language. However, what remains unclear is whether early linguistic experience that is limited only to the very early years can still aid the adult language learner when relearning the language, even after many years of disuse. In one series of studies of Korean adoptees who were completely cut off from Korean when they were adopted (between ages 3 and 8), the adoptees do not seem to show any advantages of their early experiences with Korean. In fact, they appear to show no memory for their childhood language, which seems to indicate that without continued experience with a childhood language, the benefits of early linguistic experience cannot be maintained. In contrast, other studies indicate that adult learners of a heritage language that they spoke or heard only during early childhood do show benefits of such early, discontinued linguistic experience. Although they did not have regular experience with the language after early childhood, these adult learners speak with a better accent than those adult learners who have not had such experiences, thus demonstrating that the benefits of early linguistic experience can be maintained, even when that experience is not continued after early childhood. Why is childhood language memory accessible for the adult heritage language learners but not the adoptees? Perhaps the childhood language memory is intact in both cases, but the adoptees cannot access their memory because they have not used or heard the language in many years. In contrast, adult learners of a childhood language may be able to re-access these memories because relearning the language helps activate an old memory. Thus, if Korean adoptees were to relearn their childhood language, they might be able to tap back into their childhood language. Alternatively, adults who relearned their heritage language may have had some limited but continued exposure to their childhood language through family members or members of the heritage community. This project will therefore investigate the relearning of Korean among adult Korean adoptees, a group that would not have experienced continued exposure to the language after early childhood. In Study 1, adoptees who are learning Korean as adults will take part in a language assessment at the beginning and end of their first-semester Korean language course. In Study 2, adoptees with no prior experience with Korean will take part the same language assessment before and after a series of perceptual training sessions focusing on Korean stop consonants. In both studies, adoptees? performance will be compared to that of English-monolingual non-adoptees to see whether adoptees show any advantage over first-time learners of the language. They will also be compared to native Korean speakers to assess how native-like their abilities are. We will also investigate whether these effects vary with a range of psychological and emotional factors.

This study will enrich our understanding of how early language experiences can impact adult language learning. It will inform us about the role of early, discontinued language experience on later language learning, which has implications for parents who may want to expose their young children to more than one language. Additionally, the study will inform parents of internationally adopted children who may want to help their children in learning or maintaining their childhood language. It will also contribute to our understanding of adoptee development by examining how pre-adoption experiences may affect later development, even in adulthood. Finally, the study will aid in the design of language instruction courses, especially for those programs in which many of the language learners come from various types of heritage backgrounds.