Infant boys are more vocal than infant girls

• Type of Material: Article
• Authors: Kimbrough D Oller, University of Memphis; Ulrike Griebel, University of Memphis; Dale D Bowman, University of Memphis; Edina Bene, University of Memphis; Helen L Long, University of Memphis; Hyunjoo Yoo, University of Alabama; Gordon Ramsay, Emory University
• Language: English
• Date: 2020-05-18
• Publisher: CELL PRESS
• Publication Version: Author Accepted Manuscript (After Peer Review)
• Copyright Statement: © 2020 Elsevier Inc.
• License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International
• Final Published Version (URL): http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.03.049
• Title of Journal or Parent Work: CURRENT BIOLOGY
• Volume: 30
• Issue: 10
• Start Page: R426
• End Page: R427
• Grant/Funding Information: This research was funded by grants DC011027 and DC015108 from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, MH100029 from the National Institute on Mental Health, and by the Plough Foundation, the Holly Lane Foundation, the Marcus Foundation, the Woodruff-Whitehead Foundation, and the Georgia Research Alliance.
• Keywords: Biology; Life Sciences & Biomedicine - Other Topics; Science & Technology; Cell Biology; Life Sciences & Biomedicine; Biochemistry & Molecular Biology

Abstract

Although it is generally assumed females have a language advantage over males, Oller et al., studying all-day recordings of 100 infants, found that boys in the first year of life produced more speech-like vocalizations than girls and that the effect size was more than four times larger than the commonly reported female language advantage.