Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore, Singapore.
Dev Sci. 2011 Sep;14(5):949-59. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2011.01044.x. Epub 2011 Jun 8.
Infants attune to their birth language during the second half of infancy. However, internationally adopted children are often uniquely required to attune to their birth language, and then reattune to their adoptive language. Children who were adopted from India into America at ages 6-60 months (N = 8) and had minimal further exposure to their birth languages were compared to age-matched American non-adopted controls. Without training, neither group could discriminate a phonemic contrast that occurs in their birth language but not in English. However, after training on the contrast, the adopted group (N = 8) improved significantly and discriminated the contrast more accurately than their non-adopted peers. While English had explicitly replaced the birth language of the adopted sample, traces of early exposure conferred privileges on subsequent learning. These findings are consistent with behavioral and neurophysiological data from animals that have identified some of the mechanisms underlying such a 'retention without further use' phenomenon.
婴儿在婴儿期的后半段会逐渐适应他们的母语。然而，国际收养的儿童通常需要独特地适应他们的母语，然后再重新适应他们的收养语言。从印度被收养到美国的 6-60 个月大的儿童（N=8），并且他们很少再接触到自己的母语，他们与同龄的美国非收养对照组进行了比较。未经训练，两组都无法区分他们的母语中存在但英语中不存在的音位对比。然而，在对对比进行训练后，被收养组（N=8）的表现显著提高，并且比他们的非收养同龄人更准确地识别出了对比。尽管英语已经明确取代了被收养样本的母语，但早期接触的痕迹为后续学习赋予了特权。这些发现与动物的行为和神经生理学数据一致，这些数据确定了支持这种“无需进一步使用即可保留”现象的一些机制。
