| Children adopted internationally may have poor language and social communication skills due to different pre-adoption factors such as time spent in institutional care or foster care as well as a disruption in language acquisition. Social communication involves processing and interpreting verbal and nonverbal language. It develops through face-to-face interactions with caregivers in language-rich environments. Characteristics of pragmatic language impairment include deficits in structural language, nonverbal communication, pragmatics, and social interactions. Research has shown that children adopted internationally perform lower on measures of nonverbal communication, social understanding, and pragmatic language. However, little longitudinal research during school-age has been done on children adopted internationally. In addition, little research using a comparison group of age-matched peers who are not adopted has been done. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to compare parent perceptions of language and social communication skills between parents of children adopted internationally and children who are not adopted at ages 6 and 8. Parent report was used to gather information on the children's language and social communication behaviors through the Children's Communication Checklist-2 (CCC-2, Bishop, 2003).;The study included 49 children (25 adopted). The children adopted internationally were adopted before the age of 2 and were adopted from Asian and Eastern European countries. The two groups, children adopted internationally and children who are not adopted, were not significantly different for age at time 1 and time 2 of testing, parent education, and parent income.;Results indicated that parent-reported language skills are lower of children adopted internationally when compared to age-matched peers over time. However, parent perceptions of nonverbal communication improved with time for children adopted internationally. Parent perceptions of coherent communication decreased over time for children adopted internationally, which supports previous research of children adopted internationally having difficulty with social understanding and inferencing. Parent perceptions of developmental growth patterns did not differ significantly from age 6 to 8 years for both groups. Overall, children adopted internationally have lower language skills as compared to nonadopted peers as perceived by their parents.;It is recommended that clinicians consider including measures of nonverbal communication and social understanding in their language assessments when assessing children adopted internationally. |
