Reliability of the serial reaction time task: If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again.

Procedural memory is involved in the acquisition and control of skills and habits that underlie rule and procedural learning, including the acquisition of grammar and phonology. The serial reaction time task (SRTT), commonly used to assess procedural learning, has been shown to have poor stability (test-retest reliability). We investigated factors that may affect the stability of the SRTT in adults.

Disentangling genetic and environmental influences on early language development: The interplay of genetic propensity for negative emotionality and surgency, and parenting behavior effects on early language skills in an adoption study.

Parenting and children's temperament are important influences on language development. However, temperament may reflect prior parenting, and parenting effects may reflect genes common to parents and children. In 561 U.

The reliability of the serial reaction time task: meta-analysis of test-retest correlations.

The Serial Reaction Time task, one of the most widely used tasks to index procedural memory, has been increasingly employed in individual differences research examining the role of procedural memory in language and other cognitive abilities. Yet, despite consistently producing robust procedural learning effects at the group level (i.e.

Limited Evidence of an Association Between Language, Literacy, and Procedural Learning in Typical and Atypical Development: A Meta-Analysis.

The ability to extract patterns from sensory input across time and space is thought to underlie the development and acquisition of language and literacy skills, particularly the subdomains marked by the learning of probabilistic knowledge. Thus, impairments in procedural learning are hypothesized to underlie neurodevelopmental disorders, such as dyslexia and developmental language disorder. In the present meta-analysis, comprising 2396 participants from 39 independent studies, the continuous relationship between language, literacy, and procedural learning on the Serial Reaction Time task (SRTT) was assessed across children and adults with typical development (TD), dyslexia, and Developmental Language Disorder (DLD).

Language and reading impairments are associated with increased prevalence of non-right-handedness.

Handedness has been studied for association with language-related disorders because of its link with language hemispheric dominance. No clear pattern has emerged, possibly because of small samples, publication bias, and heterogeneous criteria across studies. Non-right-handedness (NRH) frequency was assessed in N = 2503 cases with reading and/or language impairment and N = 4316 sex-matched controls identified from 10 distinct cohorts (age range 6-19 years old; European ethnicity) using a priori set criteria.

Alexithymia and intolerance of uncertainty predict somatic symptoms in autistic and non-autistic adults.

Autistic people have more physical health problems than non-autistic people. We were interested in whether autistic people experience more discomfort in their bodies than non-autistic people and whether certain psychological traits contribute to that. A survey was completed online by older adolescents and adults, 51 of whom were autistic, 32 of whom thought they might be autistic but were not diagnosed and 119 who were not autistic.

Shared storybook reading with children at family risk of dyslexia.

Background: Shared storybook reading is an important context for language learning and often constitutes young children's first encounter with the printed word. The quality of early shared reading interactions is a known predictor of language and reading development, but few studies have examined these interactions in children at family risk of dyslexia.

Methods: This exploratory study describes the quality of shared storybook reading between mothers and their 3- to 4-year-old children at family risk of dyslexia (FR;  = 18) in comparison with dyads with no known risk (no-FR;  = 13).

A rare missense variant in the ATP2C2 gene is associated with language impairment and related measures.

At least 5% of children present unexpected difficulties in expressing and understanding spoken language. This condition is highly heritable and often co-occurs with other neurodevelopmental disorders such as dyslexia and ADHD. Through an exome sequencing analysis, we identified a rare missense variant (chr16:84405221, GRCh38.

Mind-Mindedness and Stress in Parents of Children with Developmental Disorders.

Relations between mind-mindedness (assessed using the describe-your-child interview) and stress were investigated in parents of children with developmental disorders (ADHD, n = 51, ASD, n = 23, Down's Syndrome, n = 38, and 22q11.2 Deletion Syndrome, 22q11.2DS, n = 32) and typically-developing children (n = 89).

Breadth versus depth: Cumulative risk model and continuous measure prediction of poor language and reading outcomes at 12.

This study examines whether, and how, multiple risks in early childhood are associated with an increased likelihood of a poor language or literacy outcome in early adolescence. Using data from 210 participants in the longitudinal Twins Early Developmental Study, we focus on the following risk factors at age 4: family risk, and poor language, speech, emergent literacy and nonverbal skills. The outcomes of interest at age 12 are language, reading fluency and reading comprehension.

Does the Inclusion of a Genome-Wide Polygenic Score Improve Early Risk Prediction for Later Language and Literacy Delay?

Purpose The ability to identify children early in development who are at substantial risk for language/literacy difficulties would have great benefit both for the children and for the educational and therapeutic institutions that serve them. Information that is relatively easily available prior to the age of 3 years, such as late talking, family history of language/literacy difficulties, and socioeconomic status, have some but very limited predictive power. Here, we examine whether the inclusion of a DNA-based genome-wide polygenic score that has been shown to capture children's genetic propensity for educational attainment (EA3) adds enough prediction to yield a clinically useful score.

Dyslexia and Developmental Language Disorder: comorbid disorders with distinct effects on reading comprehension.

Background: Reading comprehension draws on both decoding and linguistic comprehension, and poor reading comprehension can be the consequence of a deficit in either of these skills.

Methods: Using outcome data from the longitudinal Wellcome Language and Reading Project, we identified three groups of children at age 8 years: children with dyslexia (N = 21) who had deficits in decoding but not oral language, children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD; N = 38) whose decoding skills were in the normal range, and children who met criteria for both dyslexia and DLD (N = 29).

Results: All three groups had reading comprehension difficulties at the ages of 8 and 9 years relative to TD controls though those of the children with dyslexia were mild (relative to TD controls, d = 0.

Developmental Outcomes for Children at High Risk of Dyslexia and Children With Developmental Language Disorder.

We followed children at family risk of dyslexia and children with preschool language difficulties from age 3½, comparing them with controls (N = 234). At age 8, children were classified as having dyslexia or Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and compared at earlier time points with controls. Children with dyslexia have specific difficulties with phonology and emergent reading skills in the preschool period, whereas children with DLD, with or without dyslexia, show a wider range of impairments including significant problems with executive and motor tasks.

Grammar Clinical Marker Yields Substantial Heritability for Language Impairments in 16-Year-Old Twins.

Purpose: There is a need for well-defined language phenotypes suitable for adolescents in twin studies and other large-scale research projects. Rice, Hoffman, and Wexler (2009) have developed a grammatical judgment measure as a clinical marker of language impairment, which has an extended developmental range to adolescence.

Method: We conducted the first twin analysis, along with associated phenotypic analyses of validity, of an abridged, 20-item version of this grammatical judgment measure (GJ-20), based on telephone administration using prerecorded stimuli to 405 pairs of 16-year-olds (148 monozygotic and 257 dizygotic) drawn from the Twins Early Development Study (Haworth, Davis, & Plomin, 2012).

The genetic architecture of oral language, reading fluency, and reading comprehension: A twin study from 7 to 16 years.

This study examines the genetic and environmental etiology underlying the development of oral language and reading skills, and the relationship between them, over a long period of developmental time spanning middle childhood and adolescence. It focuses particularly on the differential relationship between language and two different aspects of reading: reading fluency and reading comprehension. Structural equation models were applied to language and reading data at 7, 12, and 16 years from the large-scale TEDS twin study.

The Home Literacy Environment as a Predictor of the Early Literacy Development of Children at Family-Risk of Dyslexia.

The home literacy environment (HLE) predicts language and reading development in typically developing children; relatively little is known about its association with literacy development in children at family-risk of dyslexia. We assessed the HLE at age 4 years, precursor literacy skills at age 5, and literacy outcomes at age 6, in a sample of children at family-risk of dyslexia ( = 116) and children with no known risk ( = 72). Developmental relationships between the HLE and literacy were comparable between the groups; an additional effect of storybook exposure on phoneme awareness was observed in the family-risk group only.

Further evidence for a parent-of-origin effect at the NOP9 locus on language-related phenotypes.

Background: Specific language impairment (SLI) is a common neurodevelopmental disorder, observed in 5-10 % of children. Family and twin studies suggest a strong genetic component, but relatively few candidate genes have been reported to date. A recent genome-wide association study (GWAS) described the first statistically significant association specifically for a SLI cohort between a missense variant (rs4280164) in the NOP9 gene and language-related phenotypes under a parent-of-origin model.

Why does parental language input style predict child language development? A twin study of gene-environment correlation.

Unlabelled: There are well-established correlations between parental input style and child language development, which have typically been interpreted as evidence that the input style causes, or influences the rate of, changes in child language. We present evidence from a large twin study (TEDS; 8395 pairs for this report) that there are also likely to be both child-to-parent effects and shared genetic effects on parent and child. Self-reported parental language style at child age 3 and age 4 was aggregated into an 'informal language stimulation' factor and a 'corrective feedback' factor at each age; the former was positively correlated with child language concurrently and longitudinally at 3, 4, and 4.

Copy Number Variation Screen Identifies a Rare De Novo Deletion at Chromosome 15q13.1-13.3 in a Child with Language Impairment.

A significant proportion of children (up to 7% in the UK) present with pronounced language difficulties that cannot be explained by obvious causes like other neurological and medical conditions. A substantial genetic component is predicted to underlie such language problems. Copy number variants (CNVs) have been implicated in neurodevelopmental and psychiatric conditions, such as autism and schizophrenia, but it is not fully established to what extent they might contribute to language disorders.

Language and traits of autism spectrum conditions: evidence of limited phenotypic and etiological overlap.

Language difficulties have historically been viewed as integral to autism spectrum conditions (ASC), leading molecular genetic studies to consider whether ASC and language difficulties have overlapping genetic bases. The extent of genetic, and also environmental, overlap between ASC and language is, however, unclear. We hence conducted a twin study of the concurrent association between autistic traits and receptive language abilities.

Genome-wide association study of receptive language ability of 12-year-olds.

Purpose: Researchers have previously shown that individual differences in measures of receptive language ability at age 12 are highly heritable. In the current study, the authors attempted to identify some of the genes responsible for the heritability of receptive language ability using a genome-wide association approach.

Method: The authors administered 4 Internet-based measures of receptive language (vocabulary, semantics, syntax, and pragmatics) to a sample of 2,329 twelve-year-olds for whom DNA and genome-wide genotyping were available.

Illusory recovery: are recovered children with early language delay at continuing elevated risk?

Purpose: To examine the later development of language and literacy of children who had delayed language at age 2 but were in the normal range at age 4.

Method: Longitudinal data were analyzed from 3,598 pairs of twins participating in the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS). Six hundred thirty-three twins (8.

Language impairment from 4 to 12 years: prediction and etiology.

Purpose: The authors of this article examined the etiology of developmental language impairment (LI) at 4 and 12 years of age, as well as the relationship between the 2.

Method: Phenotypic and quantitative genetic analyses using longitudinal data from the Twins Early Development Study (Oliver & Plomin, 2007) were conducted. A total of 2,923 pairs of twins (1,075 monozygotic [MZ]; 975 dizygotic same sex [DZss]; and 873 dizygotic opposite sex [DZos]) provided data at 4 and 12 years.