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This question is mainly a reference request. I will use the term first native language for the language of the adoptee's birth region and second native language for the language of their adoption region.

I have seen quite a few papers studying how international adoptees acquire their second native language. From my understanding, internationally adopted children usually have a normal linguistic development in their second native language, if they are adopted at or before the age of 2. In addition, I have seen that most children no longer recognize their first native language after 22 weeks. So, in some sense, they simply become monolingual native speakers of their second native language.

However, I also remember from my intro to linguistics class that a type of critical period for phonology takes place in the first year of a child's life. Where they build a categorical recognition of their native language's phonology. After this period, the original flexibility for recognizing sounds outside of the phonology of their native language is lost. Do international adoptees somehow retain this categorical recognition of their first native language?

In addition, suppose that an international adoptee tries to acquire their first native language later in life, as an adult, does this initial exposure to the first native language during the critical period still have any effects? Furthermore, in general, is there any research on international adoptees studying their first native language later in life and if their language acquisition is significantly different from other SL-learners?

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    Anecdatally, when I started studying Mandarin at university, I had a fellow student who had been adopted from China as a baby. He didn’t appear to have any particular advantages over the rest of us, struggling with the same points of grammar and pronunciation (tones, especially) as everyone else.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Aug 28 at 8:44
  • Many immigrant children end up not even able to speak their first language well.
    – Adam Bittlingmayer
    Commented Sep 3 at 4:09

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This isn't a complete answer by far, but this study should help with the last part of your question: https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/13.2.155. The conclusion was that adults that were adopted as a child (In this case, French people with Korean heritage) did not show a greater affinity to the 'second native language' as you put it than adults who were native to the region of the 'first native language'.

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