Tilburg University Language Center, Professor Cobbenhagenlaan 205, 5037 DB Tilburg, the Netherlands.
Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University, 6500 HD Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
Cognition. 2021 Aug;213:104788. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104788. Epub 2021 Jul 2.
Adults who as children were adopted into a different linguistic community retain knowledge of their birth language. The possession (without awareness) of such knowledge is known to facilitate the (re)learning of birth-language speech patterns; this perceptual learning predicts such adults' production success as well, indicating that the retained linguistic knowledge is abstract in nature. Adoptees' acquisition of their adopted language is fast and complete; birth-language mastery disappears rapidly, although this latter process has been little studied. Here, 46 international adoptees from China aged four to 10 years, with Dutch as their new language, plus 47 matched non-adopted Dutch-native controls and 40 matched non-adopted Chinese controls, undertook across a two-week period 10 blocks of training in perceptually identifying Chinese speech contrasts (one segmental, one tonal) which were unlike any Dutch contrasts. Chinese controls easily accomplished all these tasks. The same participants also provided speech production data in an imitation task. In perception, adoptees and Dutch controls scored equivalently poorly at the outset of training; with training, the adoptees significantly improved while the Dutch controls did not. In production, adoptees' imitations both before and after training could be better identified, and received higher goodness ratings, than those of Dutch controls. The perception results confirm that birth-language knowledge is stored and can facilitate re-learning in post-adoption childhood; the production results suggest that although processing of phonological category detail appears to depend on access to the stored knowledge, general articulatory dimensions can at this age also still be remembered, and may facilitate spoken imitation.
在成长过程中被收养到不同语言社区的成年人保留了他们母语的知识。人们知道，拥有（无意识）这种知识有助于（重新）学习母语的语音模式；这种感知学习也可以预测这些成年人的发音成功，这表明所保留的语言知识具有抽象性质。被收养者学习他们的收养语言非常迅速和完整；母语的掌握很快就消失了，尽管后者的过程很少被研究。在这里，46 名来自中国的 4 至 10 岁的国际收养者，以荷兰语为新语言，加上 47 名匹配的非收养荷兰母语对照组和 40 名匹配的非收养中国对照组，在两周的时间内进行了 10 个区块的训练，以感知识别汉语语音对比（一个音段，一个声调），这些对比与任何荷兰语对比都不同。中国对照组轻松完成了所有这些任务。同样的参与者还在模仿任务中提供了语音产生数据。在感知方面，收养者和荷兰对照组在训练开始时的表现同样不佳；随着训练，收养者的表现显著提高，而荷兰对照组则没有。在发音方面，收养者在训练前后的模仿都可以更好地识别，并且收到了更高的良好评分，比荷兰对照组的模仿得分更高。感知结果证实，母语知识是存储的，可以促进收养后童年的重新学习；发音结果表明，尽管语音范畴细节的处理似乎依赖于对存储知识的访问，但在这个年龄段，一般的发音维度仍然可以被记住，并且可能有助于口语模仿。
