Longitudinal Associations Among Reading Related Skills and Reading Comprehension: A Twin Study

摘要

The present study investigated the etiology of longitudinal relations among kindergarten pre-reading skills, first grade word level reading skills, and seventh grade reading comprehension in 265 monozygotic and 459 dizygotic twin pairs (Mage = 6.29 years in kindergarten) from the Florida Twin Project on Reading. Using a quadvariate Cholesky decomposition, results showed genetic, shared, and non-shared environmental overlap between pre-reading skills, word level reading skills, and reading comprehension. In addition, genetic and shared environmental overlap was indicated among word level reading skills and reading comprehension, outside the influence of pre-reading skills. After accounting for overlapping, there remained moderate genetic and non-shared environmental influence specific to reading comprehension. Implications for reading education are discussed.