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- Title
A twin study of the etiology of high readingability.
- Authors
Boada, Richard; Willcutt, Erik G.; Tunick, Rachel A.; Chhabildas, Nomita A.; Olson, Richard K.; DeFries, John C.; Pennington, Bruce F.
- Abstract
The present study examined the etiology of high reading ability in an overall sample of 350 twin pairs in which at least one member of 100 pairs (54 MZ, 46 DZ) had a reading composite score one standard deviation above the sample mean. These high readers also had significantly higher scores than the rest of the sample on Full Scale, Verbal and Performance IQ scores, as well as on measures of phoneme awareness, orthographic coding, phonological decoding, and verbal short-term memory. The MZ proband-wise concordance rate for high group membership was significantly higher than the DZ proband-wise concordance rate and further behavioral genetic analyses corroborated that high reading ability is partly due to genetic influence (h2g = 0.55 ± 0.22). Bivariate multiple regression analyses demonstrated that high phonological awareness, orthographic coding, phonological decoding, and short-term verbal memory skills all share significant common genetic influence with high reading ability. These results suggest that reading ability and its cognitive correlates are on a continuous distribution, with both extremes of the distribution being similarly heritable. They also support the hypothesis that the same cognitive processes that are associated with dyslexia are important for the development of high reading ability.
- Subjects
ANALYSIS of variance; DISTRIBUTION (Probability theory); SHORT-term memory; LANGUAGE disorders; MEMORY; CHARACTERISTIC functions
- Publication
Reading & Writing, 2002, Vol 15, Issue 7/8, p683
- ISSN
0922-4777
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1023/A:1020965331768