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Updated: Aug 11, 2026

Using Cholesky Decomposition to Explore Individual Differences in Longitudinal Relations between Reading Skills
Published on: September 17, 2019
Reading skills in early readers: genetic and shared environmental influences
Stephen A Petrill1, Kirby Deater-Deckard, Lee Anne Thompson
1Center for Developmental and Health Genetics, Pennsylvania State University, University Park 16802, USA. sap27@psu.edu
Abstract:
The present study combined parallel data from the Northeast-Northwest Collaborative Adoption Projects (N2CAP) and the Western Reserve Reading Project (WRRP) to examine sibling similarity and quantitative genetic model estimates for measures of reading skills in 272 school-age sibling pairs from three family types (monozygotic twins, dizygotic twins, and unrelated adoptive siblings). The study included measures of letter and word identification, phonological awareness, phonological decoding, rapid automatized naming, and general cognitive ability. Estimates of additive genetic effects and shared environmental effects were moderate and significant. Furthermore, shared environmental effects estimated in twins were generally similar in magnitude to adoptive sibling correlations, suggesting highly replicable estimates across different study designs.
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