The effect of consanguineous marriage on reading disability in the Arab community

Abstract

The present study examined the effect of consanguineous marriage in the Arab community on reading disabilities of offspring. It examined whether the rate of reading disabilities was higher among offspring of first-cousin parents than offspring of unrelated parents; and whether reading-disabled children of first-cousin parents were more disabled in phonological awareness and phonological decoding than reading-disabled children of unrelated parents and normally reading younger children. These questions were investigated among 814 pupils of the 4th, 5th, and 6th grades, using word recognition and reading comprehension tests. Two experimental groups were chosen from this population. These were a reading-disabled group of 22 pupils who were children of first-cousin marriages and 21 pupils who were children of unrelated parents. A control group was also selected, consisting of 21 younger normally reading pupils at the same reading level. All the groups were tested on non-words, real words, phonological, orthographic and working memory measures. The results indicated that the rate of reading disabilities among children of first-cousin parents was higher than that of with children of second-cousin parents, distantly related parents, or unrelated parents. Further, no differences were found in phonological awareness and decoding between the two reading-disabled groups. Moreover, the results indicate a significant advantage of the younger normal readers over the reading-disabled children in the measures of phonological awareness, decoding, and orthographical knowledge that requires spelling. However, in reading common words and choosing words in context, the performance of the reading-disabled groups and the normally reading group were similar. It has been suggested that further research is needed to evaluate the role of intelligence, nevertheless our results provide new evidence for a genetic basis to reading disabilities.

Could an Interactive-Balanced Environment for Reading Acquisition Overcome the Triad Risk Factors: Low Socioeconomic Status, Low Literacy Skills and Language Properties?

“…As previously suggested by Abu-Rabia (1999, 2000a, 2000b, 2003 and Makhoul (2006), the results indicate that multi-componential balanced literacy pro-moting program is required to compensate for the gaps in literacy skills as a result of Arabic the Diglossic nature and in overcoming its orthographic complexity. It's worthy to note that the program has demonstrated its efficacy despite the great variance in the children's literacy skills, thus stressing its adequacy as a reading acquisition program.…”

Psychophysical indices of perceptual functioning in dyslexia: A psychometric analysis

“…A task based on the AXB design described by Mengler, Hogben, Michie, and Bishop (2005) was used to measure difference thresholds. This task presents three 100-ms 85-dB SPL tones (10 ms rise/fall) separated by 300 ms.…”

The Effect of Consanguinity on Neonatal Outcomes and Health

“…The variation in these results further corroborates the assumption that the extent of adverse effects caused by consanguinity may be multifactorial in nature. In addition, hyperactivity, learning and reading disorders are significantly more common among consanguineous unions [56][57][58] .…”