Resumen de Learning English and losing Chinese: A case study of a child adopted from China

Elena Nicoladis, Howard Grabois

• Studies of early language acquisition show that children focus on the language in their environment toward the end of the first year. This study concerned the acquisition of English and the loss of Chinese by a child adopted from China into an English-speaking family in Canada at the age of 17 months. As she was adopted after the age of one year, her switch to English might be expected to be slow and difficult. The child's production and comprehension of Chinese and English were observed from four weeks after her arrival. Her acquisition of English was remarkably fast, as was her loss of Chinese. These data suggest that the child's language acquisition was founded on already established social and communicative processes. Her previous exposure to Chinese may have allowed her to learn about language use in general, thus facilitating her rapid acquisition of English.