Nursery World - Gene pinpointed in language disorders

Better diagnosis and treatment could soon be available for children with inherited language impairments, following the discovery of a contributing gene.

Dr Simon Fisher, a Royal Society research fellow at the Wellcome TrustCentre, who led the research, said, 'It has been suspected thatinherited factors play an important role in childhood languagedisorders, but this is the first time that we have been able toimplicate variants of a specific gene in common forms of languageimpairment.'

An investigation into the a recognised language-related gene FOXP2,published online last week in the New England Journal of Medicine, foundthat particular variants of the CNTNAP2 gene were associated withlanguage deficits in families with Specific Language Impairment(SLI).

The researchers found that children who carried a certain variant of thegene displayed reduced language abilities and nonsense-word repetitioncommon in SLI.

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