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Genetic factors in the ontogeny of spoken language: evidence from monozygotic and dizygotic twins*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

John L. Locke  and
Patricia L. Mather
John L. Locke*
Affiliation:
MGH Institute of Health Professions, Boston, Massachusetts and Harvard Medical School
Patricia L. Mather
Affiliation:
Northeastern Illinois University
*
Neurolinguistics Laboratory, MGH Institute of Health Professions, 15 River Street, Boston, MA 02108, USA.
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Abstract

Recent controversy about the innateness of language has awakened interest in the genetic basis of linguistic development. In this study, we analysed more extensively data from Mather & Black (1984).in order to test the hypothesis that the speech articulation of monozygotic (MZ) twins would be qualitatively more similar than that of age- and sex-matched dizygotic (DZ) twins. Analyses revealed that 4–year-old MZ twin pairs were significantly more likely to misproduce the same sounds on an articulation test than were DZ twin pairs, and that DZ twins were no more likely to share errors than were children who were both genetically and environmentally unrelated. There was no evidence that MZ twins made more similar errors than DZ twins, and indeed it was difficult to make this determination since only broad categories of error (substitution, distortion, omission) were available for analysis. The greater amount of genetic material shared by MZ twins, and the presumably more similar morphology of their speech mechanisms, may have caused certain sound patterns to be of more nearly equal difficulty for both members of a MZ pair. However, these findings need to be confirmed with phonetically more detailed analyses.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , October 1989 , pp. 553 - 559
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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Footnotes

*

Based on a talk presented at the 1987 Meeting of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association in New Orleans. The authors are indebted to Dawn Pearson for assistance with statistical analyses and the preparation of figures.

References

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