There is considerable variability in the extent to which young people with developmental language disorder (DLD) experience mental health difficulties. What drives these individual differences remains unclear. In the current article, data from the Twin Early Development Study were used to investigate the genetic and environmental influences on psychopathology in children and adolescents with DLD (n = 325) and those without DLD (n = 865). Trivariate models were fitted to investigate etiological influences on DLD and psychopathology and bivariate heterogeneity and homogeneity models were fitted and compared to investigate quantitative differences in etiological influences on psychopathology between those with and without DLD. The genetic correlation between DLD and internalizing problems in childhood was significant, suggesting that their co-occurrence is due to common genetic influences. Similar, but nonsignificant effects were observed for externalizing problems. In addition, genetic influences on internalizing problems, but not externalizing problems, appeared to be higher in young people with DLD than those without DLD, suggesting that the presence of DLD may exacerbate genetic risk for internalizing problems. These findings indicate that genetic influences on internalizing problems may also confer susceptibility to DLD (or vice versa) and that DLD serves as an additional risk factor for those with a genetic predisposition for internalizing problems.

患有发育性语言障碍 (DLD) 的年轻人经历心理健康困难的程度存在很大差异。是什么驱动了这些个体差异仍不清楚。在当前的文章中，来自双胞胎早期发育研究的数据用于调查遗传和环境对患有 DLD（n = 325）和没有 DLD（n= 865)。拟合三变量模型以研究病因对 DLD 和精神病理学的影响，并拟合双变量异质性和同质性模型并进行比较，以研究患有和未患 DLD 的患者之间病因对精神病理学影响的定量差异。DLD 与儿童期内化问题之间的遗传相关性显着，这表明它们的共同发生是由于共同的遗传影响。对于外部化问题，观察到类似但不显着的影响。此外，遗传对内化问题的影响，而不是外化问题，在患有 DLD 的年轻人中似乎高于没有 DLD 的年轻人，这表明 DLD 的存在可能会加剧内化问题的遗传风险。