ROBO1 has well-established roles in brain development (Hannula-Jouppi et al., 2005; St Pourcain et al., 2014), and has been implicated in dyslexia as well as phonological short-term memory (Bates et al., 2011; Hannula-Jouppi et al., 2005), while its homologue ROBO2 has been linked with expressive vocabulary during early language acquisition (St Pourcain et al., 2014). The gene discussed is ROBO2; the disease is dyslexia.