Submitted by giuliomagnifico t3_zdcpbl in science
This should surprise no one.
Just because something is unsurprising does not mean that there is no value to actually knowing.
>In the end, the team couldn’t account for girls’ bigger vocabularies based on what they heard before they uttered their first words. Rather, they found that parents talked more to their kids once they started talking, regardless of gender.
The boys are waiting until they have something worthwhile to say.
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I'll summarise what I read in the article. The study found that girls and boys talk the same amount and start talking at about the same age, and that apparently parents don't talk more to girls than boys. They still don't know why girls have larger vocabularies. What they did find out is that parents talk more often to their children after their children start talking, regardless of the gender of their child.
As soon as we start speaking we get told to STFU as well.
Parents talk with kids that are more talkative. Baby girls tend to be more talkative.
But the article explicitly dispels the myth that girls talk more than boys, and also mentions that girls only start talking about one month earlier than boys.
No. They found that baby boys talked just as much as baby girls.
The cause of baby girls having a larger vocabulary remains unknown.
Meaning girls have parents talking with them about a month sooner giving them a leg up on vocabulary.
One month is a massive massive difference when it comes to early childhood development. Cannot be overstated how huge of a difference that is.
Kids are all different. My daughter was having conversations at 18 months. Due to my daughters early chattiness we thought there was something wrong with our son when he hardly spoke at 2. Just turns out kids do everything in their own time. The boy we thought had a learning delay won't quit singing the 12 Days of Christmas now at 4.
Interesting, but the sample size is very small and they only processed the most talkative few hours a day from each 16 hour daily recording. I'm a little surprised they didn't seem to incorporate how often children were spoken to, rather just what happened in the most talkative moments, which were around 1/8 to 1/4ish of the day each day.
Cool preliminary findings, but this needs way more intensive studies to determine anything with confidence.
Yeah but they get sooner/more talked to because of their vocabulary. Chicken or egg?
I've seen a lot of literature and even a couple of documentaries that point out the differences (advantages, plainly) in adulthood that correspond to a comparatively late development.
Could it be that the “chattiest few hours of each recording” are not different for boys and girls but there are differences in the less chatty hours that accumulate to larger differences over time? Seems like the easiest explanation to me.
Girls like to draw people into conversations by whatever means necessary even in adolescence.
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Perhaps more a “virtuous cycle” — a little bit earlier start of speech means a bit more being spoken to, means more rapid speech acquisition, means yet more being spoken to, etc. Seems absolutely plausible that what seems like a small difference in when speech starts could end up causing a larger vocabulary difference.
Ill fix it for ya:
baby girls have bigger vocabularies. They dont know why.
parents talk more to talkative children, regardless of gebder
What about other genders?
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This is my anecdotal experience. Boys tend to like “busier” things like playing with cars etc. girls like to read books and pretend play which both involve talking and learning more vocabulary.
There's way, way more than the stuff I've incidentally read or watched. Google around for "late development higher IQ" or something along those lines and you're more or less guaranteed to find papers on it.
I wonder if it's related to the physical differences in what boys vs girls are allowed to experience. At least in my life, I saw and see little girls who are made to sit, be careful. I knew girls who couldn't ride bikes and girls who had to wear skirts, which are limiting, physically. They're also treated as more fragile than boys, and altogether that would give them more time to think about things and develop in that aspect.
While boys who run, play, ride bikes, and are more allowed to play rough would spend more time on that aspect of development. Just a theory.
This study suggests girls pick up language better even though they aren’t practicing more. Your mechanism could be true only if, like i was suggesting, the study was selecting data that wouldn’t show gender differences even though they are there in the other hours.
Practicing more, no, and maybe it doesn't but maybe more time to have internal dialogue counts towards practicing more.
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Adding some minor sub points to further clarify:
Both baby girls and baby boys speak about the same amount on average
The distribution of talkative-to-non-talkative for babies appears to be generally independent of gender, i.e., there are approximately as many very talkative boys as there are very talkative girls, and approximately as many not very talkative boys as there are not very talkative girls.
As a further clarifying side note, for anyone else who stumbles upon this, the girls have, on average, larger vocabularies, which means they know a larger number of words, but they don't, again on average, speak a larger number of times per day.
It is interesting to me as a parent and teacher that boys trend behind in grades and reading ability and college admittance but trend higher on the payscales. Probably a bit of practicality and a bit of societal influence imo
All dogs are boys and all cats are girls.
We need to be able to identify when we are believing something that is a fallacy.
Why are things the way they are and do they need to change?
Maybe a mom spending time with her daughter is more likely to fill the silence by talking and the child picks it up faster. where a father spending time with his son is more likely to enjoy the silence. Just personal experience, not a scientist.
When kids can't talk, they can't self-express gender, so you pretty much have to go on biological sex assigned at birth. I suppose you could do a retrospective study, but it would take 20+ years to get that data and you'd still have sample size issues and dropout issues where you couldn't get accurate self-selected gender information for people because they didn't update contact information.
Unfortunately, there are some parts of developmental science that are just plain difficult to study with modern understanding of gender identity.
This is not so different from adult second language acquisition. Many people try and fail to learn foreign languages as adults and an important reason many fail to achieve fluency despite spending many hours listening to tapes and studying is that they lack experience in failed interactions that they can learn from.
The babbling part is generally left out of ESL instruction because it's impractical to package up and sell in a profitable manner but it actually works. I found in my studies of Chinese as a second language that the students I attended class with at a very intensive institute would have less ability than people I met outside of class who didn't even intentionally study Chinese but had lovers who were native speakers. The latter would almost instantly develop fluency in cooing type language that gave them a base to explore other type of language interactions in public.
I myself was making very slow progress until one day I learned a phrase that is often mumbled in a jumbled together fashion which means something like "Is that so?" I thought this was a funny phrase to use because nobody could tell if I really knew what I was saying or just mumbling nonsense so I would randomly just repeat it to native speakers and they would assume that I was fluent and then speak back in a stream of words I couldn't understand but became motivated to recall and try to sort out later. From that point on, my progress was steady and I began to develop fluency. But it all went back to basically walking around murmuring at people not knowing what they were saying and trying to guess from the context which is surprisingly easy once you try it.
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