Continuing in my post about a great article about speech and language acquisition in adoptees... (see part 1 here).

The article recommends early testing of children adopted from Eastern Europe, even though it acknowledges that problems may not show up until children are school-aged. Early testing, the doctors in the article say, may show areas that need to be addressed later.

It's important to give recently adopted children a chance to spend time adapting to their family and new home. Even after a phase of seemingly rapid new language acquisition and smooth adjustment to the home, children may begin to show significant learning problems, which can persist long after the period needed to address bilingual and adjustment issues.

"If language difficulties were related solely to differences in length of exposure to English, it would be merely a matter of allowing extra time for children to 'catch up' developmentally," said Dr. Hough. "This is often not the case."

If children have any native language acquisition, they generally lose it from 3 to 6 months after adoption. Often, children who are adopted older are put into ESL classes, but the method of language acquisition is different as there's no one at home reinforcing the native language and teaching the child new words. There's also no one interpreting the language or their experiences for them. They're all alone in the world of language.

Instead, they're experiencing an "abrupt language switch" and may experience up to a year of a silent period while they lose the old and acquire the new.

Clinicians should keep the following in mind when they assess a child adopted from an Eastern European orphanage:

• 
  children lose one month of development for every three months they spend in an orphanage, according to research by Dana Johnson, MD, PhD, of the University of Minnesota International Adoption Clinic, and




• children over age 2 who were adopted before 18 months of age can be evaluated with standardized language assessment norms, while those adopted after that age should not be assessed against standardized norms until two years after adoption, according to Sharon Glennon, PhD, director of the Speech-Language Pathology program at Towson University.

Go to part 3.