Adopted children from China recognize their native language

Children aged 4 to 10 who have been adopted from China and who no longer know a word of Chinese have been shown to have stored a basic knowledge of their native language. This knowledge can be activated in young children. This baggage may even help in later years when they want to learn a Chinese language again.

Linguists Wencui Zhou, Mirjam Broersma and Anne Cutler of Tilburg University and Radboud University Nijmegen write this in the journal Cognition . They demonstrate this unconscious knowledge in children for Cantonese and Mandarin, so-called tonal languages ??with properties that Dutch does not know.

The linguists tested 46 children who were adopted when they were between nine months and 4.5 years old. As a test group, they set 47 non-adopted Dutch children against this. The subjects were on average seven years old.

The researchers visited all the children at home to have them take individual tests. Mirjam Broersma: 'The tasks are as playful as possible to motivate the children.' On a screen you see a panda mother with two panda babies. For example, the mother says the Chinese sound 'atshhhé'. Then one screen baby repeats 'atshhhé', the other 'atsé'; the test children have to say which baby says the same thing as the mother and which doesn't. If the test child gives the correct answer, flowers will appear and the baby panda will jump up and down.

Tone language

There are also experiments with variations in tones: Chinese is a tonal language. For example, a vowel whose pitch goes up can mean something different than the same vowel with a low pitch. Broersma: 'If you don't know those differences from an early age, they are difficult to learn.'

The tests were done first without exercise, then with. Prior to that training, no differences were measurable between the results of the adopted children and those of non-adopted children; none of them heard the specific Chinese sounds. But then they trained all the children with sound exercises. Thereafter, the adopted Chinese children clearly outperformed the non-adopted children in both tasks. They more often extracted the correct sound, and imitated the differences between the language tones.

The conclusion is that unconscious knowledge is activated in the adopted children. Broersma: 'They have no active knowledge of Chinese: they know no words, no songs, nothing. But they subconsciously know that the tone is important and that they have to pay attention to that.'

And does this unconscious knowledge also help when adopted adults want to relearn their native language? ' According to previous research, this knowledge does indeed play a role, but we don't know how great that advantage is,' says Boersma.

Claartje Levelt, Leiden professor of first language acquisition, who is not involved in this research, finds the results very interesting: 'Children who have been adopted at the age of nine months recognize word fragments and sound differences better than non-adopted children. The prevailing idea is that until they are about ten months old, babies can distinguish all possible speech sounds; after that, that ability is limited to the sounds from one's own mother tongue. Now, as early as nine months old, a language-specific sound system seems to have been stored, which is not simply replaced by a new birth language, but which can be reactivated. A new question is, for example, up to what age that reactivation is still possible.'

ADOPTED SANNE HAK (22) LEARNS THE CHINESE LANGUAGE WITH EASE

Sanne Hak (22) from Giessenburg was picked up by her Dutch adoptive parents in China when she was eleven months old. She has just completed her first six months of Chinese lessons with researcher Wencui Zhou at Tilburg University.

'I will start my master's degree in law in September. I am from Hunan province, where pandas come from. I was abandoned at a train station, I had no more with me than a blanket, a bottle and some rice biscuits. I was taken to a children's home. Being from Chenzhou city, the home has given me 'Chen' as last name. They called me Chunlei Chen. Thanks to the Chinese lessons I now know that you pronounce Chunlei as Tsjunlee; I didn't know that before. I don't remember a word, not a sound of Chinese.

'The university offers language courses to students through its Language Center. That's how Chinese lessons came my way. I did a Mandarin course. I've closed it enough.

'During the lessons I found the 'tones', the sounds in Chinese, not so difficult to distinguish. They make sense in my head. I don't have to learn those things by heart. I was the only student of Chinese descent at the course. Incidentally, I don't feel Chinese: I feel just as Western as everyone around me.

'My parents and boyfriend said, 'Maybe you have an aptitude for Chinese? I still thought: that could well be. When I read Wencui's research, it was a very special surprise; maybe it's just that I subconsciously remember things about the language. In my experience, I don't really have a problem with the pronunciation.

“I intend to continue with Chinese. The university has a Chinese course for Beginners 2.'

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