Abstract
This twin study examined the relative contributions of genes and environment on 2nd language reading acquisition of Chinese-speaking children learning English. We examined whether specific skills—visual word recognition, receptive vocabulary, phonological awareness, phonological memory, and speech discrimination—in the 1st and 2nd languages have distinct or overlapping genetic and environmental origins. A sample of 279 Chinese twin pairs with a mean age of 6 years was tested. Univariate twin analyses were used to identify sources of individual variations in reading abilities and related cognitive–linguistic skills in Chinese and English, respectively. They were used to show both similar and distinctive patterns in these skills across Chinese and English. Bivariate Cholesky decomposition analyses indicated genetic overlaps between all parallel Chinese and English variables, as well as shared environmental overlaps in receptive vocabulary and phonological awareness. The phenotypic correlations between 1st and 2nd language skills previously observed in cross-linguistic studies could be explained by the shared genetic and environmental influences found in this twin study.
Highlights
This twin study examined the relative contributions of genes and environment on 2nd language reading acquisition of Chinese-speaking children learning English
We examined whether specific skills—visual word recognition, receptive vocabulary, phonological awareness, phonological memory, and speech discrimination—in the 1st and 2nd languages have distinct or overlapping genetic and environmental origins
The phenotypic correlations between 1st and 2nd language skills previously observed in cross-linguistic studies could be explained by the shared genetic and environmental influences found in this twin study
Summary
This twin study examined the relative contributions of genes and environment on 2nd language reading acquisition of Chinese-speaking children learning English. In the current study, we tested a more homogenous sample of native Chinese speakers who routinely learn English as a second language, examining the heritability of the first and second language reading skills as well as their genetic overlaps. In a study of Korean-speaking ESL children, English speech perception and phonological awareness were important contributors to early English reading abilities, independent of English oral language skills (Chiappe, Glaeser, & Ferko, 2007). A similar problem was observed in distinguishing the English front vowels /æ/and /e/ as appear in the word pair “bad– bed.” Such perceptual difficulties would hinder the formation of distinct representation of English phonemes as well as English reading. One might anticipate that the better the knowledge of Chinese, the harder it might be to learn English
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