Phonological Processing Skills of Children Adopted Internationally – Research Says…

I am joining fellow speech pathologist bloggers in reading and blogging about a recent research related to our field. For more information or to see more research reviews, check out this blog.

I have several amazing friends who have recently adopted or are in the process of adopting children internationally. Over the past couple of years, I have also worked with a few children who have been adopted internationally. For these reasons, I found this study about certain language skills of children adopted internationally to be a great one to review.

Phonological processing skills are very important for oral language and literacy development. Phonological skills include phonological awareness, phonological memory, and rapid naming. Phonological processing skills are referred to as the decoding component of reading. These skills as well as comprehension are essential for reading success.

The children who participated in the study were adopted from China before 25 months of age. The study was performed when the children were between 6 years, 8 months – 9 years, 3 months. They were individually given a formal phonological processing test. Some of the children were receiving speech therapy for articulation or language impairment.

The researchers wanted to find whether children who were adopted internationally had difficulties with phonological processing skills at the school-age when compared with a normative sample of children their age. After formal assessments, the study noted that these children preformed within the average range of scores to the tests’ normative sample.

They also examined whether age at time of adoption had an impact on phonological processing skills at school-age. The results indicated that age at time of adoption was not correlated with reading comprehension or phonological processing skills. It should be noted that this particular study only examined children who had been adopted before 25 months old. Previous studies have found that age of adoption is correlated with later school language skills. These previous studies may have studied a broader age range of adopted children.

Scott, K., Pollock, K., Roberts, J., and Krakow, R. (2013) Phonological Processing Skills of Children Adopted Internationally. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 22, 673-683.