Elsje van Bergen

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Which children go on to develop dyslexia? Since dyslexia has a multifactorial etiology, this question can be restated as: what are the factors that put children at high risk for developing dyslexia? It is argued that a useful theoretical framework to address this question is Pennington’s (2006) multiple deficit model (MDM). This model replaces mode...

Across a wide range of studies, researchers often conclude that the home environment and children’s outcomes are causally linked. In contrast, behavioral genetic studies show that parents influence their children by providing them with both environment and genes, meaning the environment that parents provide should not be considered in the absence o...

It is challenging to study whether children resemble their parents due to nature, nurture, or a mixture of both. Here we used a novel design that employs the fact that parents transmit 50% of their alleles to their offspring. The combined effect of these transmitted and non-transmitted alleles on a trait are summarized in a polygenic score (PGS). T...

Background This study investigates the causal relationships between reading and print exposure and investigates whether the amount children read outside school determines how well they read, or vice versa. Previous findings from behavioural studies suggest that reading predicts print exposure. Here, we use twin‐data and apply the behaviour‐genetic...

Children's academic achievement is linked to their parents’ education, a link often attributed to resources and support in the home. Yet children also inherit genes and grow up in complex social networks, requiring genetically-informed designs to uncover causal environmental effects. We used Norwegian register data from 569,035 children (aged 10–14...

ADHD, dyslexia, and dyscalculia often co-occur, and the underlying continuous traits are correlated (ADHD symptoms, reading, spelling, and math skills). This may be explained by trait-to-trait causal effects, shared genetic and environmental factors, or both. We studied a sample of ≤ 19,125 twin children and 2,150 siblings from the Netherlands Twin...

Background Numerous studies have investigated the associations between the home literacy environment (HLE) and children's word reading skills. However, these associations may partly reflect shared genetic factors since parents provide both the reading environment and their child's genetic predisposition to reading. Hence, the relationship between t...

In the classical twin design, the assumption that the additive genetic (A) and shared environment (C) variance components are uncorrelated may not hold. If there is positive AC covariance, the C component is overestimated. Two processes have been studied that lead to AC covariance: Cultural transmission (e.g., genetic nurture), when the parents’ ge...

Non-cognitive skills, such as motivation and self-regulation, are partly heritable and predict academic achievement beyond cognitive skills. However, how the relationship between non-cognitive skills and academic achievement changes over development is unclear. The current study examined how cognitive and non-cognitive skills are associated with ac...

Children born to parents with fewer years of education are more likely to have depression, anxiety, and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but it is unclear to what extent these associations are causal. We estimated the effect of parents’ educational attainment on children’s depressive, anxiety, and ADHD traits at age 8 years, in a sa...

There is a negative association between intelligence and psychopathology. We analyzed data on intelligence and psychopathology to assess this association in seven-year-old Dutch twin pairs (ranging from 616 to 14,150 depending on the phenotype) and estimated the degree to which genetic and environmental factors common to intelligence and psychopath...

Families transmit genes and environments across generations. When parents’ genetics affect their children’s environments, these two modes of inheritance can produce an ‘indirect genetic effect’. Such indirect genetic effects may account for up to half of the estimated genetic variance in educational attainment. Here we tested if indirect genetic ef...

The non-cognitive skills self-control and grit are often considered predictors of school performance, but whether this relationship is causal remains unclear. We investigated the causality of this association using a twin design. Specifically, we evaluated the direct impact of self-control and grit on school performance, while controlling for genet...

This study examines the role of genes and environments in predicting educational outcomes. We test the Scarr-Rowe hypothesis, suggesting that enriched environments enable genetic potential to unfold, and the compensatory advantage hypothesis, proposing that low genetic endowments have less impact on education for children from high socio-economic s...

Background We investigate if covariation between parental and child attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) behaviors can be explained by environmental and/or genetic transmission. Methods We employed a large children-of-twins-and-siblings sample ( N = 22 276 parents and 11 566 8-year-old children) of the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child...

ADHD, dyslexia and dyscalculia often co-occur. Also, the underlying continuous traits are correlated (ADHD symptoms, reading, spelling, and math skills). This may be explained by trait-to-trait causal effects and/or shared genetic and environmental factors. We studied a sample of ≤19,125 twin children and 2,150 siblings from the Netherlands Twin Re...

Individual differences in educational attainment (EA) and physical health, as indexed by body mass index (BMI), are correlated within individuals and across generations. The aim of our study was to assess the transmission of these traits from parents to their offspring in childhood and adolescence. We analyzed BMI and EA in 13,916 families from the...

Background By combining the classical twin design with regression analysis, we investigated the role of two non‐cognitive factors, self‐control and grit, in the prediction of school performance. We did so at the phenotypic, genetic, and environmental level. Methods Teachers filled out a survey on the twins' school performance (school grades for re...

Background: The non-cognitive skills self-control and grit have often been cited as predictors of school performance, but a limited number of studies have addressed the question whether this relationship is causal. We investigated the causal nature of this association in a classical twin design, with mono- and dizygotic twin pairs. Specifically, we...

Noncognitive skills such as motivation and self-regulation, predict academic achievement beyond cognitive skills. However, the role of genetic and environmental factors and of their interplay in these developmental associations remains unclear. We provide a comprehensive account of how cognitive and noncognitive skills contribute to academic achiev...

Noncognitive skills such as motivation and self-regulation, predict academic achievement beyond cognitive skills. However, the role of genetic and environmental factors and of their interplay in these developmental associations remains unclear. We provide a comprehensive account of how cognitive and noncognitive skills contribute to academic achiev...

Background: By combining the classical twin design with regression analysis, we investigated the role of two non-cognitive factors, self-control and grit, in the prediction of school performance. We did so at the phenotypic, genetic, and environmental level. Methods: Teachers filled out a survey on the twins’ school performance (school grades for r...

Handedness has been studied for association with language‐related disorders because of its link with language hemispheric dominance. No clear pattern has emerged, possibly because of small samples, publication bias, and heterogeneous criteria across studies. Non‐right‐handedness (NRH) frequency was assessed in N = 2503 cases with reading and/or lan...

A bstract We investigate the causal relationship between educational attainment (EA) and mental health using two research designs. First, we compare the relationship between EA and seventeen psychiatric diagnoses within sibship in Dutch national registry data (N = 1.7 million), controlling for unmeasured familial factors. Second, we use two-sample...

Background: We investigate if covariation between parental and child ADHD behaviors can be explained by environmental and/or genetic transmission. Methods: We employed a large children-of-twins-and-siblings sample (N=22,350 parents & 11,566 8-year-old children) of the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study (MoBa). This enabled us to disent...

Worldwide, the majority of people prefer using the right hand for most motor tasks. Because of the link between handedness and language hemispheric dominance, handedness has been studied for association with language-related disorders. No clear pattern has emerged from these studies, and inconsistencies have been attributed to small sample sizes, p...

There is a negative association between intelligence and psychopathology, implying that individuals with intellectual disability are at greater risk for psychopathology. We analyzed data on intelligence and psychopathology in seven-year-old twin pairs (npairs ≥ 616) to determine the degree to which genetic and environmental factors common to intell...

It has been suggested that parental mathematics anxiety may influence their children’s mathematics anxiety, attitudes, and performance. It remains an open question whether these parent-child associations differ by parental sex or parental involvement. We tested 249 Dutch-speaking Belgian participants, forming 83 (biological) mother–father–child tri...

Children who like to read and write tend to be better at it. This association is typically interpreted as enjoyment impacting engagement in literacy activities, which boosts literacy skills. We fitted direction‐of‐causation models to partial data of 3690 Finnish twins aged 12. Literacy skills were rated by the twins’ teachers and literacy enjoyment...

Understanding how parents’ cognitive and non-cognitive skills influence offspring education is essential for educational, family and economic policy. We use genetics (GWAS-by-subtraction) to assess a latent, broad non-cognitive skills dimension. To index parental effects controlling for genetic transmission, we estimate indirect parental genetic ef...

Background: Parents and children resemble each other in ADHD behaviors. A key theoretical postulate from the evolutionary life history theory is that children use information from their environment (e.g., predictability and resource availability) and develop traits that are optimized for future success in that environment. Life history theory there...

We present the Multi Co-moment Structural Equation Model (MCM-SEM), a novel approach to estimating the direction and magnitude of causal effects in the presence of confounding. In MCM-SEM, not only covariance structures but also co-skewness and co-kurtosis structures are leveraged. Co-skewness and co-kurtosis provide information on the joint non-no...

Background Individual differences in educational attainment (EA) and physical health, as indexed by body mass index (BMI), are correlated within persons and across generations. The present aim was to assess these associations while controlling for parental transmission. Methods We analyzed BMI and EA obtained for 8,866 families from the Netherland...

Background: Having twin and non-twin siblings might influence autistic traits both prenatally and postnatally. The twin testosterone transfer hypothesis suggests that girls with a twin brother are exposed to higher levels of prenatal testosterone than girls with a twin sister, and that increased testosterone exposure masculinizes neural developmen...

This chapter assesses ways to identify and support children with learning disabilities. Learning disabilities affect many students and are seldom attributable to a single cause. They arise through complex interactions between biological and environmental factors within individual developmental trajectories. Early identification of children at risk...

Background: Having twin and non-twin siblings might influence autistic traits both prenatally and postnatally. The twin testosterone transfer hypothesis suggests that girls with a twin brother are exposed to higher levels of prenatal testosterone than girls with a twin sister. Prenatally, increased testosterone exposure could masculinize neural dev...

Across a wide range of studies, researchers often conclude that the home environment and children’s outcomes are causally linked. In contrast, behavioral genetic studies show that parents influence their children by providing them with both environment and genes, meaning the environment that parents provide should not be considered in the absence o...

Background Individual differences in educational attainment (EA) and physical health, as indexed by body mass index (BMI), are correlated within persons and across generations. The present aim was to assess these associations while controlling for parental transmission. Methods We analyzed BMI and EA obtained for 8,866 families from the Netherland...

Children who like to read and write tend to be better at it. This association is typically interpreted as enjoyment impacting engagement in literacy activities, which boosts literacy skills. We fitted direction-of-causation models to partial data of 3,690 Finnish twins aged 12. Literacy skills were rated by the twins’ teachers and literacy enjoymen...

The classical twin model can be reparametrized as an equivalent multilevel model. The multilevel parameterization has underexplored advantages, such as the possibility to include higher-level clustering variables in which lower levels are nested. When this higher-level clustering is not modeled, its variance is captured by the common environmental...

Little is known about the genetic architecture of traits affecting educational attainment other than cognitive ability. We used genomic structural equation modeling and prior genome-wide association studies (GWASs) of educational attainment (n = 1,131,881) and cognitive test performance (n = 257,841) to estimate SNP associations with educational at...

The trend toward large-scale collaborative studies gives rise to the challenge of combining data from different sources efficiently. Here, we demonstrate how Bayesian evidence synthesis can be used to quantify and compare support for competing hypotheses and to aggregate this support over studies. We applied this method to study the ordering of mul...

The classical twin model can be reparametrized as an equivalent multilevel model. The multilevel parameterization has underexplored advantages, such as the possibility to include higher-level clustering variables in which lower levels are nested. When this higher-level clustering is not modeled, its variance is captured by the common environmental...

According to the hybrid model (van Bergen, van der Leij, & de Jong, 2014), the significant association among executive functioning (EF), reading, and math may be partially explained by parent-reported EF’s role as a common risk and/or protective factor in reading and math (dis)abilities. The current study used a sample of 434 twin pairs (Mage 􏰀 12....

According to the Hybrid Model (van Bergen et al., 2014), the significant association among Executive functioning (EF), reading, and math may be partially explained by parent-reported EF’s role as a common risk and/or protective factor in reading and math (dis)abilities. The current study used a sample of 434 twin pairs (Mage = 12.12) from Florida t...

According to the Hybrid Model (van Bergen et al., 2014), the significant association among Executive functioning (EF), reading, and math may be partially explained by parent-reported EF’s role as a common risk and/or protective factor in reading and math (dis)abilities. The current study used a sample of 434 twin pairs (Mage = 12.12) from Florida t...

According to the Hybrid Model (van Bergen et al., 2014), the significant association among Executive functioning (EF), reading, and math may be partially explained by parent-reported EF’s role as a common risk and/or protective factor in reading and math (dis)abilities. The current study used a sample of 434 twin pairs (Mage = 12.12) from Florida t...

Understanding how parents shape their children’s educational trajectories is a socially important research goal. Evidence on the effects of parents’ cognitive and non-cognitive skills on offspring education is weakened by poor assessments of non-cognitive skills and inadequate accounting for genetic inheritance. In this preregistered study, we use...

In a randomized-controlled trial we tested a computer-assisted intervention for the prevention of reading difficulties, delivered by nonprofessional tutors, running from kindergarten to halfway Grade 2. The full sample included 123 prereaders (M � 5; 6 years; 56 intervention; 67 controls) with low preliteracy skills. Parents were sent a questionnai...

It remains a challenge to determine whether children resemble their parents due to nature, nurture, or a mixture of both. Here we used a design that exploits the distinction between transmitted and non-transmitted alleles in genetic transmission from parent to offspring. Two separate polygenic scores (PGS) were calculated on the basis of the transm...

Objective: Advanced parenthood increases the risk of severe neurodevelopmental disorders like autism, Down syndrome and schizophrenia. Does advanced parenthood also negatively impact offspring’s general neurodevelopment? Method: We analyzed child-, father-, mother- and teacher-rated attention-problems (N = 38,024), and standardized measures of inte...

Does reading a lot lead to better reading skills, or does reading a lot follow from high initial reading skills? The authors present a longitudinal study of how much children choose to read and how well they decode and comprehend texts. This is the first study to examine the codevelopment of print exposure with both fluency and comprehension throug...

Educational attainment (EA) is influenced by cognitive abilities and by other characteristics and traits. However little is known about the genetic architecture of these "non-cognitive" contributions to EA. Here, we use Genomic Structural Equation Modelling and results of prior genome-wide association studies (GWASs) of EA (N = 1,131,881) and cogni...

The Netherlands Twin Register (NTR) is a national register in which twins, multiples and their parents, siblings, spouses and other family members participate. Here we describe the NTR resources that were created from more than 30 years of data collections; the development and maintenance of the newly developed database systems, and the possibiliti...

The purpose of this study was to test the directionality of influence between reading comprehension (RC) and print exposure (PE), thereby estimating genetic and environmental effects of this relation. The sample consisted of 910 twins in fourth through ninth grades (Mage = 12.33 years, SD = 1.41) from the Florida Twin Project on Reading, Behavior,...

Bullying comes in different forms, yet most previous genetically-sensitive studies have not distinguished between them. Given the serious consequences and the high prevalence of bullying, it is remarkable that the aetiology of bullying and its different forms has been under-researched. We present the first study to investigate the genetic architect...

Since the first descriptions of children with congenital word blindness or dys-lexia, the proper criteria for diagnosis of dyslexia have been debated. Issues in this debate concern, among others, the role of underlying causes of reading and spelling and the use of a discrepancy between reading ability and intelligence. This chapter will consider re...

Peer bullying and victimization are a widespread phenomenon among school-age children and can have detrimental effects on the development of children. To examine whether having a close companion during childhood increases or decreases risk of victimization and bullying, this study compared twins to singleton children. A large group of twins (n = 9,...

Associations between home literacy environment and children's reading ability are often assumed to reflect a direct influence. However, heritability could account for the association between parent and child literacy-related measures. We used data from 101 mother/father/child triads to consider the extent to which associations between home literacy...

Recent genome wide association scans (GWAS) for reading and language abilities have pin-pointed promising new candidate loci. However, the potential contributions of these loci remain to be validated. In the present study, we tested 17 of the most significantly associated single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) from these GWAS studies (p < 10(-6) in...

The large body of literature on the association between blood pressure (BP) and cognitive functioning has yielded mixed results, possibly due to the presence of non-linear effects across age, or because BP affects specific brain areas differently, impacting more on some cognitive skills than on others. If a robust association was detected among BP...

Objective: The Computerized Neurocognitive Battery (CNB) enables efficient neurocognitive assessment. The authors aimed to (a) estimate validity and reliability of the battery's Dutch translation, (b) investigate effects of age across cognitive domains, and (c) estimate heritability of the CNB tests. Method: A population-representative sample of...

In dit hoofdstuk bespreek ik onderzoek naar kinderen met een familiair risico op dyslexie en onderzoek naar de erfelijkheid van dyslexie en leesvaardigheid. Ik zal dit hoofdstuk aanvangen met het presenteren van een theoretisch model, wat een kader schept voor het vervolg. Bij de bespreking van dit model zal ik tevens verwijzen naar andere hoofdstu...

Cognitive processes underlying a behavioural outcome (like reading ability) and the impact of familial risk (e.g., for dyslexia) have been studied in isolation. We present a novel design, linking the two avenues. How do familial influences impact on children’s cognitive skills, which subsequently underlie reading development? Participants from the...

This study focuses on the stability of dyslexia status from Grade 2 to Grade 8 in four groups: (a) no dyslexia in either grade (no-dyslexia, n = 127); (b) no dyslexia in Grade 2 but dyslexia in Grade 8 (late-emerging, n = 18); (c) dyslexia in Grade 2 but not in Grade 8 (resolving, n = 15); and (d) dyslexia in both grades (persistent-dyslexia, n = 2...

The combination of investigating child and family characteristics sheds light on the constellation of risk factors that can ultimately lead to dyslexia. This family-risk study examines plausible preschool risk factors and their specificity. Participants (N = 196, 42 % girls) included familial risk (FR) children with and without dyslexia in Grade 3...

Converging evidence suggests that developmental dyslexia is a neurobiological disorder, characterized by deficits in the auditory, visual, and linguistic domains. In the longitudinal project of the Dutch Dyslexia Programme, 180 children with a familial risk of dyslexia (FR) and a comparison group of 120 children without FR (noFR) were followed from...

Prospective studies which involve children who have a dyslexic parent and, hence, have a family risk of becoming dyslexic, provide the opportunity to examine the differential development of at-risk children who do and do not become dyslexic and controls (i.e., not at-risk non-dyslexics). The question is in what respect at-risk children who do not d...

Do children who go on to develop dyslexia show normal verbal and nonverbal development before reading onset? According to the aptitude-achievement discrepancy model, dyslexia is defined as a discrepancy between intelligence and reading achievement. One of the underlying assumptions is that the general cognitive development of children who fail to l...

This family-risk (FR) study examined whether the literacy skills of parents with dyslexia are predictive of the literacy skills of their offspring. We report data from 31 child-parent dyads where both had dyslexia (FR-D) and 68 dyads where the child did not have dyslexia (FR-ND). Findings supported the differences in liability of FR children with a...

The present study concerns literacy and its underlying cognitive skills in Dutch children who differ in familial risk (FR) for dyslexia. Previous studies with FR-children were inconclusive regarding the performance of FR-children without dyslexia as compared to the controls. Moreover, van Bergen et al. (2011) recently showed that FR-children with a...

The study concerns reading development and its precursors in a transparent orthography. Dutch children differing in family risk for dyslexia were followed from kindergarten through fifth grade. In fifth grade, at-risk dyslexic (n = 22), at-risk non-dyslexic (n = 45), and control children (n = 12) were distinguished. In kindergarten, the at-risk non...

When we see an object in the world, there may be a large number of different ways to interact with that object. This large 'visuomotor space' can be constrained through affordances (perceptually available object properties defining potential uses), task demands and the actor's intentions. The effects of perceptual biases can be modified by performa...

Grip selection tasks have been used to test "planning" in both autism and developmental coordination disorder (DCD). We differentiate between motor and executive planning and present a modified motor planning task. Participants grasped a cylinder in 1 of 2 orientations before turning it clockwise or anticlockwise. The rotation resulted in a comfort...

Grip selection tasks have been used to test “planning” in both autism and developmental coordination disorder (DCD). We differentiate between motor and executive planning and present a modified motor planning task. Participants grasped a cylinder in 1 of 2 orientations before turning it clockwise or anticlockwise. The rotation resulted in a comfort...

We explored the relationship between hand orientation and movement time. Three groups of participants (n = 8 per group) were asked to grasp an object rotated in one of the following planes: (1) coronal; (2) sagittal; (3) horizontal. In the coronal plane, the rotational requirements directly mapped onto the neuromuscular demands associated with a si...