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

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.