Environmental moderators of genetic influence on verbal and nonverbal abilities in early childhood
Section snippets
Participants
A total of 4446 twin children were assessed close to their fourth birthdays. This sample of same-sex twin pairs was drawn from the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS). TEDS is an ongoing longitudinal study in which all twins born in England and Wales between 1994 and 1996 were invited to take part (Trouton et al., 2002). Twin pairs were excluded from the current analyses if at least one child in the pair had a specific medical syndrome such as Downs or was an extreme outlier for birthweight,
Results
Table 2 shows means and standard deviations for MZ and same-sex DZ pairs on both the cognitive and environmental measures. Although significant mean differences were found between MZ and DZ twins for nonverbal ability and several of the environmental variables, the effect sizes (d) were .1 or less.
Table 3 shows correlations for each of the environmental measures with verbal and nonverbal ability, presented separately for MZ and DZ twins.
It can be seen in Table 3 that associations between
Discussion
This study was designed to answer two main questions: firstly, is the heritability of cognitive abilities affected by measured environments in early childhood, and secondly, is G × E better described by the diathesis-stress model or the bioecological approach? To answer these questions we utilized a large sample with measures of both proximal and distal aspects of the environment. We found significant interaction effects for verbal ability with family chaos, instructive parent–child communication
Acknowledgements
The authors are indebted to the twins and their parents in the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS) for making the study possible. TEDS is supported by a program grant from the UK Medical Research Council (G9424799). During the initial drafting of this paper Theodore Wachs was supported by a Fulbright Fellowship.
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