The genetic and environmental etiologies of the relations between cognitive skills and components of reading ability.

Abstract

While previous research has shown cognitive skills to be important predictors of reading ability in children, the respective roles for genetic and environmental influences on these relations is an open question. The present study explored the genetic and environmental etiologies underlying the relations between selected executive functions and cognitive abilities (working memory, inhibition, processing speed, and naming speed) with three components of reading ability (word reading, reading comprehension, and listening comprehension). Twin pairs drawn from the Colorado Front Range (n = 676; 224 monozygotic pairs; 452 dizygotic pairs) between the ages of eight and 16 (M = 11.11) were assessed on multiple measures of each cognitive and reading-related skill. Each cognitive and reading-related skill was modeled as a latent variable, and behavioral genetic analyses estimated the portions of phenotypic variance on each latent variable due to genetic, shared environmental, and nonshared environmental influences. The covariance between the cognitive skills and reading-related skills was driven primarily by genetic influences. The cognitive skills also shared large amounts of genetic variance, as did the reading-related skills. The common cognitive genetic variance was highly correlated with the common reading genetic variance, suggesting that genetic influences involved in general cognitive processing are also important for reading ability. Skill-specific genetic variance in working memory and processing speed also predicted components of reading ability. Taken together, the present study supports a genetic association between children’s cognitive ability and reading ability.

Explaining the sex difference in dyslexia

“…The current study did not address the etiology of the sex difference in dyslexia, but previous work in this sample indicates genetic covariation between reading skill and the cognitive correlates studied here (Christopher et al, 2016;Willcutt et al, 2010).…”

Common variation within the SETBP1 gene is associated with reading-related skills and patterns of functional neural activation

“…This deficit may subsequently distort proper development of cortical representations that are essential for reading acquisition (Hari and Renvall, 2001). Moreover, genetic studies have shown that variation in reading performance is explained by specific genes and by a set of genes in common with pWM (Christopher et al, 2016;van Leeuwen et al, 2009), suggesting a common underlying genetic factor. It is therefore plausible to hypothesize a specific detrimental effect of SRDcandidate genes upon the phonological loop (Baddeley, 2003), which has been shown to be distinctly impaired in subjects with SRD compared to normal readers (Swanson et al, 2009), rather than upon the sequence processing in general.…”

Gene–Environment Interplay and Individual Differences in Behavior

“…However, the "phenotype" educational attainment has been operationally defined in many different ways, such as years of education (Okbay et al, 2016), highest degree completed (Belsky et al, 2016), and score on a U.K. nationwide examination (Rimfeld et al, 2015;Shakeshaft et al, 2013). It is also possible to study the link between genetics and certain components of education attainment such as mathematics (Chen et al, 2017;Wang et al, 2014) or reading (Christopher et al, 2016;Davis et al, 2014;Gialluisi, Guadalupe, Francks, & Fisher, 2016). It is unclear whether these different measurements of educational attainment are all tapping into the same phenotype, or instead measuring distinct components of behavior.…”