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Korean adoptees in Sweden: Have they lost their first language completely?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2014

HYEON-SOOK PARK
HYEON-SOOK PARK*
Affiliation:
Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Hyeon-Sook Park, Department of Scandinavian Languages, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, 107, Imun-ro, Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul 130-791, Republic of Korea. E-mail: hsp@hufs.ac.kr
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Abstract

Two current issues in research on first language (L1) attrition among adoptees are explored: whether adoptees have lost their L1 completely and whether relearning can help them recover their L1 if it is not completely lost. These issues are investigated by examining whether Swedish monolingual Korean adoptees’ preexisting knowledge of L1 Korean has an impact on their relearning of Korean as adults. The results suggest that Korean adoptees’ early L1 experience has left traces of the language and that these traces can have an effect on their phonetic perception when relearning the language. The finding that reexposed adoptees performed better than native Swedish learners indicates that the greatest impact on retrieving L1 knowledge comes from relearning. Given the lack of the statistically significant findings, the results demonstrate possibilities but remain open to discussion.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 36 , Issue 4 , July 2015 , pp. 773 - 797
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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