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The language phenotype of a small geographically isolated Russian-speaking population: Implications for genetic and clinical studies of developmental language disorder

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 March 2012

NATALIA RAKHLIN ,
SERGEY A. KORNILOV ,
DEAN PALEJEV ,
ROMAN A. KOPOSOV ,
JOSEPH T. CHANG  and
ELENA L. GRIGORENKO
NATALIA RAKHLIN
Affiliation:
Yale University
SERGEY A. KORNILOV
Affiliation:
Yale University, University of Connecticut, Haskins Laboratories, and Moscow State University
DEAN PALEJEV
Affiliation:
Yale University
ROMAN A. KOPOSOV
Affiliation:
University of Tromsø and Northern State Medical University, Arkhangelsk
JOSEPH T. CHANG
Affiliation:
Yale University
ELENA L. GRIGORENKO*
Affiliation:
Yale University, Haskins Laboratories, Moscow State University, and Columbia University
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Elena L. Grigorenko, Child Study Center, 230 South Frontage Road, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06519-1124. E-mail: elena.grigorenko@yale.edu
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Abstract

This article describes the results of an epidemiological study of developmental language disorder (DLD) in an isolated rural Russian population. We report an atypically high prevalence of DLD across all age groups when contrasted with a comparison population. The results are corroborated by a set of comparisons of school-aged children from the target population with their age peers and mean length of utterance matches from the comparison population. We also investigate the relationship between nonverbal cognition, verbal working memory, and expressive language performance in the population, and find statistically significant but small effect sizes. Finally, we describe the complex and heterogeneous structure of the phenotype in the population along with patterns of its vertical transmission on the basis of the exemplar pedigrees, and discuss the implications of our findings for genetic and clinical studies of DLD.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 34 , Issue 5 , September 2013 , pp. 971 - 1003
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012 

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