The heritability of reading and reading-related neurocognitive components: A multi-level meta-analysis. Chiara Andreola et al. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, November 24 2020. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2020.11.016
Highlights
• Heritability estimates vary widely across reading-related neurocognitive skills.
• Age- and school grade-specific genetic influences have been reported.
• Past meta-analyses focused on some reading skills without controlling for moderators.
• Reading-related skills show moderate-to-substantial meta-heritability estimates.
• School grade levels moderated the heritability of some reading-related skills.
Abstract
Reading ability is a complex task requiring the integration of multiple cognitive and perceptual systems supporting language, visual and orthographic processes, working memory, attention, motor movements, and higher-level comprehension and cognition. Estimates of genetic and environmental influences for some of these reading-related neurocognitive components vary across reports.
By using a multi-level meta-analysis approach, we synthesized the results of behavioral genetic research on reading-related neurocognitive components (i.e. general reading, letter-word knowledge, phonological decoding, reading comprehension, spelling, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, and language) of 49 twin studies spanning 4.1 to 18.5 years of age, with a total sample size of more than 38,000 individuals.
Except for language for which shared environment seems to play a more important role, the causal architecture across most of the reading-related neurocognitive components can be represented by the following equation a² > e² > c². Moderators analysis revealed that sex and spoken language did not affect the heritability of any reading-related skills; school grade levels moderated the heritability of general reading, reading comprehension and phonological awareness.
Keywords: meta-analysisreading-related skillstwin studyheritabilitygenetics
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