Affiliation:
1. MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit Cambridge, U.K.
2. Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience Rutgers University New Brunswick, NJ
Abstract
This study investigated the heritability of auditory processing impairment, as assessed by Tallal's Auditory Repetition Test (ART). The sample consisted of 37 same-sex twin pairs who had previously been selected because one or both twins met criteria for language impairment (LI) and 104 same-sex twin pairs in the same age range (7 to 13 years) from the general population. These samples yielded 55 children who met criteria for LI, who were compared with 76 children whose language was normal for their age (LN group). We replicated earlier work showing that group LI is impaired relative to group LN on ART. However, there was no evidence of a heritable influence on ART scores: Correlations between twins and their co-twins were reasonably high for both MZ and DZ twins, suggesting that performance is more influenced by shared environment than genetic factors. Analyses of extreme scores gave a similar picture of nonsignificant group heritability. In contrast, a test of phonological short-term memory, the Children's Nonword Repetition Test (CNRep), gave high estimates of group heritability. In general, CNRep was a better predictor of low language test scores than ART, but ART did make a significant independent contribution in accounting for variance in a test of grammatical understanding.
Publisher
American Speech Language Hearing Association
Subject
Speech and Hearing,Linguistics and Language,Language and Linguistics
Reference50 articles.
1. Auditory temporal processing thresholds, habituation, and recognition memory over the first year;Benasich A. A.;Infant Behavior and Development,1996
2. Speech perception development in language-impaired children: A 4-year follow-up study;Bernstein L. E.;Journal of Speech and Hearing Research,1985
3. Is specific language impairment a valid diagnostic category? Genetic and psycholinguistic evidence;Bishop D. V. M.;Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, series B,1994
Cited by
200 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献