Female children tend to develop a more extensive vocabulary through baby talk and research than their male counterparts.
Researchers insist that this has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with how parents raise their children. Data from over 2,000 hours of observation shows that parents communicate more with children of both genders after they begin to talk and can react to them.
The children’s language growth is a direct result of these interactions. According to some linguists, this study proves that children have a hand in shaping their verbal environments as they develop.
How Do Language Gaps Develop between Both Genders
Previous studies have revealed that boys, rather than girls, are more likely to experience language delays and difficulties. Girls have a more extensive vocabulary than boys, and their vocabulary expands more rapidly in childhood.
Researchers Dailey and her colleagues counted and recorded the words spoken and heard by 21 girls and 23 boys for a year to confirm these studies. They fitted the children once every month with a bright vest hiding a pocket-sized tape recorder that recorded an entire day’s worth of dialogue.
Once a month, on a different day, they put a cap with a little camera on the children to record footage of their encounters.
The study accumulated over 2,100 hours of recordings, concentrating on the busiest times of the day.
The team precisely calculated the amount of each child’s vocabulary by recording the number of distinct nouns they used during the experiment. The findings corroborated those of past research showing that girls acquire a more extensive language than boys.
What Was the Result of the Study?
According to the study’s findings, girls are not significantly more talkative than boys, contrary to the general perception. The fact that boys and girls exchanged similar amounts of words suggests that increasing children’s vocabulary through conversational practice is less effective.
Girls, however, did have a slight advantage over boys when it came to speaking their first words. A study found that boys often didn’t start talking until around a month after their first birthday, while girls typically started speaking around their first birthday.
The researchers also hypothesized that because girls start talking before boys do, caretakers are more inclined to engage in conversation with females because girls are better at interacting at that age than boys.
