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The Genetic and Environmental Origins of Language Disability and Ability
Author(s) -
Spinath Frank M.,
Price Thomas S.,
Dale Philip S.,
Plomin Robert
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
child development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.103
H-Index - 257
eISSN - 1467-8624
pISSN - 0009-3920
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2004.00685.x
Subject(s) - psychology , affect (linguistics) , vocabulary , developmental psychology , grammar , population , language development , twin study , language acquisition , demography , linguistics , genetics , communication , biology , philosophy , mathematics education , heritability , sociology
This study investigated whether genes affect language impairment to the same extent as they affect differences in language ability following up an earlier study of 579 four‐year‐old twins with low language performance and their cotwins (Viding et al., in press). The present study selected low‐language twins from 6,963 pairs of twins from the Twins Early Development Study assessed for vocabulary and grammar by their parents at 2, 3, and 4 years of age. For impaired groups corresponding to the lowest scoring 5% and 10% at each age, twin concordances and model‐fitting analyses indicated substantial genetic influence on the mean difference between affected children and the population ( h 2 g ), generally higher than for individual differences for the entire sample ( h 2 ).