Disentangling the association between early verbal abilities and school performance: The role of family socioeconomic status and polygenic scores

Children’s differences in preschool verbal abilities predict their later school performance. Here, we tested whether family socioeconomic status (SES) and children’s genetic propensities confound this prediction. In 909 white British children (431 female), verbal abilities at age 4.5 years accounted for 3.5-9.2% of the variance in school performance from age 7 through 16 years; in comparison, nonverbal abilities accounted for 16.1-23.7%. For verbal but not nonverbal abilities, family SES confounded the association with school performance, accounting for 7.9% of the association at age 7 to 50.8% at age 16. No associations with children’s genetic propensities (i.e., language polygenic scores) were observed. Our findings suggest that verbal, rather than nonverbal abilities likely contribute to the transmission family background inequality in education.