Knowledge of the native language is retained, even those who never spoke

If the adopted child was in another country in his early infancy, he would still retain some “knowledge” about native language and it will be easier to speak it.

Babies are immersed in the language environment from the first days of life, and although they start to talk much later, the first experience has a great influence on future language abilities. To such conclusions came Broersma Miriam (Mirjam Broersma), a researcher from the Netherlands, and her colleagues from Australia and South Korea. Their article appears in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

The researchers examined 29 adopted children from Korea who were adopted into Dutch families in infancy and did not know the language of their biological parents. Within a few weeks they learned to distinguish and to pronounce difficult consonants in Korean, completely unknown in Northern Europe. As control was used the same group of native-born Dutch.

The experiment showed that initially those other children demonstrated approximately equal results, but already after the first training Koreans to understand and copy complex sounds of their native language much better than the Dutch. Moreover, these abilities were shown even children who left Korea at the age of six months, when they still did not talk. And there was no difference between them and those who were adopted at early stages of development of speech, older than 17 months after birth.

“This means that important information about the language accumulate already in the first stages of life, says Miriam Broersma. – A knowledge of the allowable

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