Adopted adults' access to early childhood language memory

Abstract

Cancer diagnosis and treatments often affect daily lives of patients and their caregivers and elicit distress in their lives. Consequently, cancer experience might alter interpersonal dynamics between patients and their caregivers. Patients might view cancer experience as an obstacle to maintain the give-and-take balance between themselves and their caregivers, resulting in perceived inequity in the relationship. Patients’ perception of being a burden to others, termed self-perceived burden (SPB), is a phenomenon commonly reported by terminally-ill patients in both Western and Asian countries. In the social context of cancer experience, we were interested to explore how patients’ perceptions as a care-recipient affect their mental health. A growing body of research focuses on potential lasting benefits of early childhood linguistic experience. Although some research indicates that childhood language memory, if not actively maintained, becomes inaccessible (Pallier, et al., 2003; Ventureyra, Pallier, & Yoo, 2004), other research suggests lasting benefits of childhood language experience when adults relearn the childhood language in a classroom (Tees & Werker, 1984; Au, Oh, Knightly, Jun, & Romo, 2008; Hyltenstam, Bylund, Abrahamsson, & Park, 2009; Oh, Au, & Jun, 2010). The benefits of early childhood language memory are evident even in perceptual training in the lab (Bowers, Mattys, & Gage, 2009; Singh, Liederman, Mierzejewski, & Barnes, 2011). The present study extends the perceptual training paradigm for the reacquisition of a childhood language to adults who were adopted as infants. We predicted that adopted participants would outperform novice learners after perceptual training. We also examined whether advantages in phoneme perception would extend to other areas of language learning – specifically, word learning.