What are the genetics of speech?

Tuesday 1st Dec 2015, 3.35pm

How do you start to pick apart speech at the genetic level? Dr Dianne Newbury explains what Specific Language Impairment is and how her research is unravelling a pretty complicated picture. Specific Language Impairment describes those who have difficulty learning, using and understanding language even though there aren’t any developmental, physical or other issues. In this episode Dr Dianne Newbury describes how her research picks apart genetic information to look for the genetic variation that might contribute to the disorder… but actually there are many disorders and there’s not just one gene involved, so a few different approaches have been used to unravel the clues.