Abstract
There is a strong genetic contribution to children’s language and literacy impairments. The aim of this study was to determine which aspects of the phenotype are familial by comparing 34 parents of probands with language/literacy impairments and 33 parents of typically developing probands. The parents responded to questionnaires regarding previous history for language/reading impairment and participated in psychometric testing. The psychometric test battery consisted of tests assessing non-verbal IQ, short-term memory, articulation, receptive grammar, reading abilities and spelling. Self-report measures demonstrated a higher prevalence of language and literacy impairments in parents of affected probands (32%) compared with parents of unaffected probands (6%). The two groups of parents differed significantly in their performance on the non-word repetition, oromotor and digit span tasks. Non-word repetition gave the best discrimination between the parent groups even when the data from the parents who actually were impaired as ascertained by direct testing or self-report were removed from the analyses. This suggests that non-word repetition serves as a marker of a family risk for language impairment. The paper concludes with a discussion of issues associated with ascertainment of specific language impairment (SLI).
Highlights
Tests that are familial with language and literacy impairments The focus of this research was on finding behavioral tests that would reliably identify adults affected by language impairment
When the same criterion was applied to the adult data, we found that eight parents of a language/ literacy proband (24%) and three parents of a control proband (9%) were identified as affected
As a first step toward finding tests that were sensitive to familial language impairment, we verified using self-report data that there was a higher prevalence of impairment among the parents of probands with language/literacy impairments
Summary
Tests that are familial with language and literacy impairments The focus of this research was on finding behavioral tests that would reliably identify adults affected by language impairment. Core to the development of the test battery was the idea that an underlying cognitive deficit was implicated in the expression of language/literacy impairments. We hypothesized that this deficit would be revealed through tasks involving nonsense materials such as non-word repetition and non-word reading. Discriminant analysis further revealed that performance on non-word repetition alone was able to correctly classify 75% of the participating parents into their proband groups. This effect remained even after excluding all parents identified as having a language impairment. The data further indicated a hierarchy of ability to perform the non-word repetition task such that affected parents were worse at the task than unaffected parents of probands with language/literacy impairments, who in turn were worse than parents of typically developing probands
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