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Genes and language impairment
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Most children are speaking well by the age of 6 or 7 years. An important minority (around 5%), however, have unexplained difficulty with aspects of speech and language and are said to have specific language impairment. Genetic factors are known to be important: children with specific language impairment are four times as likely as other children to have a family history of the condition and the concordance rate among monozygotic twins is twice that among dizygotic twins. Nevertheless, there is confusion about which genes are involved. Different studies have produced different results.
Abnormalities of one gene, FOXP2, are known to cause a rare autosomal dominant form of developmental verbal dyspraxia with expressive and receptive language impairment. This gene encodes a transcription factor with many targets in the brain. Now researchers in Oxford and Los Angeles (Sonja C Vernes and colleagues. New England Journal of Medicine 2008;359:2337–45; see
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