All tagged DNA

FOXP2 Explained

Our story begins in Britain in 1990. Sixteen members of a large, three-generational family, known by scientists as KE, exhibited severe orofacial dyspraxia, a condition that affects movement and coordination. Their speech was at times unintelligible, and they exhibited deficits in morphological production, struggling to inflect words for the simple past tense and the plural (Watkins, 2011). They were treated by a genetics clinic, and their story quickly attracted the attention of researchers. Hurst and colleagues (1990) established that dyspraxia was inherited – as opposed to derived from environmental factors – possibly even Mendelian, and outlined the case histories. Adding to the mystery, the researchers noted that intelligence and hearing were all normal.