Have you recently adopted a child from Eastern Europe or China, or are you preparing to do so?* Are you interested in closely tracking your child’s English language development? At the Laboratory for Developmental Studies at Harvard University, we are investigating how children who are adopted as infants and preschoolers learn English. Do children of different ages learn in the same way? Does a child’s birth language influence their acquisition of English? Our ultimate goal is to understand language development in general and the unique challenges of internationally-adopted children.

Families who participate track their child’s language development by filling out questionnaires and making home videos. At the end of the study, we use these videos to make a video scrapbook for the family which documents the child’s first year in the United States and his/her growing language skills. If your child was or will be adopted under the age of 16 months or between the ages of 2.5 and 5.5 from Eastern Europe or China, your participation would be extremely helpful.

If you are interested in learning more about the study please go to our website: www.wjh.harvard.edu/~lds/adoption or send an e-mail to: langdev@wjh.harvard.edu including your child’s date of birth, age at the time of adoption, date of adoption, and country of birth.

• We also have studies underway for children who have already been in the United States for 4 to 18 months, please see our webpage or email us for more information.