title: Early development of abstract language knowledge: evidence from perception-production transfer of birth-language memory.
abstract: Children adopted early in life into another linguistic community typically forget their birth language but retain, unaware, relevant linguistic knowledge that may facilitate (re)learning of birth-language patterns. Understanding the nature of this knowledge can shed light on how language is acquired. Here, international adoptees from Korea with Dutch as their current language, and matched Dutch-native controls, provided speech production data on a Korean consonantal distinction unlike any Dutch distinctions, at the outset and end of an intensive perceptual training. The productions, elicited in a repetition task, were identified and rated by Korean listeners. Adoptees' production scores improved significantly more across the training period than control participants' scores, and, for adoptees only, relative production success correlated significantly with the rate of learning in perception (which had, as predicted, also surpassed that of the controls). Of the adoptee group, half had been adopted at 17 months or older (when talking would have begun), while half had been prelinguistic (under six months). The former group, with production experience, showed no advantage over the group without. Thus the adoptees' retained knowledge of Korean transferred from perception to production and appears to be abstract in nature rather than dependent on the amount of experience.
authors.affiliation: Hanyang Phonetics and Psycholinguistics Lab, Hanyang University, Seoul, South Korea; Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands; ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, Australia.
authors.forename: Jiyoun
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-1560-2384
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Choi
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands; ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, Australia; The MARCS Institute, Western Sydney University, New South Wales, Australia.
authors.forename: Anne
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Cutler
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands; Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Mirjam
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Broersma
keywords: abstract representation; international adoptees; phonological acquisition; retention of early knowledge; speech perception–production link