GIRL POWER: New research elucidates a biological mechanism for why girls show better language abilities than boys.
Image: Jacek Chabraszewski/iStockphoto
-
The Wisdom of Psychopaths
In this engrossing journey into the lives of psychopaths and their infamously crafty behaviors, the renowned psychologist Kevin Dutton reveals that there is a...
Read More »
Scientific literature has been littered with studies over the past 40 years documenting the superior language skills of girls, but the biological reason why has remained a mystery until now.
Researchers report in the journal Neuropsychologia that the answer lies in the way words are processed: Girls completing a linguistic abilities task showed greater activity in brain areas implicated specifically in language encoding, which decipher information abstractly. Boys, on the other hand, showed a lot of activity in regions tied to visual and auditory functions, depending on the way the words were presented during the exercise.
The finding suggests that although linguistic information goes directly to the seat of language processing in the female brain, males use sensory machinery to do a great deal of the work in untangling the data. In a classroom setting, it implies that boys need to be taught language both visually (with a textbook) and orally (through a lecture) to get a full grasp of the subject, whereas a girl may be able to pick up the concepts by either method.
The team was able to pinpoint the differences between the sexes by monitoring brain activity in a group of children (31 boys and 31 girls, ranging in age from nine to 15) using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while the kids tackled language tasks. In the exercises, two words were either flashed in front of, or spoken to them; they had to determine whether the pair was spelled similarly (omitting the first consonant, as in "pine" and "line") and whether the words rhymed, such as "gate" and "hate" or "pint" and "mint." In some cases, the words fit neither criterion: "jazz" and "list" being an example.
Study co-author Doug Burman, a research associate in Northwestern University's communication sciences and disorders department, says the team saw greater activity in the so-called language areas of the girls' brains than in those of the boys. The areas included the superior temporal gyrus (implicated in decoding heard words), inferior frontal gyrus (speech processing), and the fusiform gyrus, which helps spell and determine the meaning of words. Activation of the latter two structures, in particular, seemed to correlate with the girls' greater language accuracy.
"For girls, it didn't matter if they heard the word or read the word," Burman says. "It does suggest that girls are learning [language attributes] in a more abstract form, and that's the ideal objective when we're teaching things."
Burman says that his team now plans to research whether girls' edge decreases with age, noting that some previous research suggests that the male sensory "bottleneck" may disappear as boys develop into adults.
See what we're tweeting about
20 Comments
Add CommentThank you for articulating something I've long suspected in raising two daughters and a granddaughter. When females have been candid with me, they often cite my rather obtuse ways of carrying on a conversation. Sometimes I find it easier to just to nod in polite agreement.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisif the research showed the exact reverse, namely that girls used more visio-auditory stimuli for word learning, then that result would have been taken to "explain" the girls' superiority in this area.. My point is, we do not know what neural activities contribute to the superior performance.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe article doesn't say how much overlap there is, if any, between the processing styles of girls (which we might call "direct") and boys (which we might call "indirect".). If there is no overlap, then you know that girls may perhaps need to be taught differently than boys for optimal learning. But if there is a lot of overlap, then how do you know whether a specific person uses "direct" or "indirect" processing? Do you give them a fMRI?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGirl Talk: Hillary Clinton is a Woman...Men Win Forevers!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGirl Talk: Women are Mentally Unstable and Emotionally Fragile By Nature
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMan... There is some people that just do not get it...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBy nature females are better in cerain tasks than males and viceversa.
That is a known fact, science just help us (allow us) to understand how or why of those difference in skills.
Ego, makes us blind to those facts.
--
Edited by Juansemail at 03/06/2008 7:08 AM
citing "Women are Mentally Unstable and Emotionally Fragile By Nature", do u have any scientific evidence to back ur argument? if not, then u have to admit u r being a sexist!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this#5: I'd definitely agree. Without information on the spread of results, we're asked to accept that the fact that girls have greater activity than boys is relevant. If any given girl only has, to pull a number out of thin air, a 55% chance of being better than any given boy at the language tasks, then the results, while interesting, are functionally useless in the classroom.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe scientific explanation is simple and obvious to even the most casual observer.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is because boys are made up of puppy dog tails.
"quod erat demonstrandum" ;-)
--
Edited by buckminster at 03/06/2008 4:50 PM
Thank you for you research,that very avail for me.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is a great fault in the methods which have been used here. It has long been evident that given the methods in which people are taught, There is more benefit to females in most cases than males. The methods of instructions tend to be, "sit down, be quiet, and listen to what the teacher is telling you." but the method has been shown to fail many males in this respect. If you do not believe what I say, then simply look at the individuals in prisons. Male criminal institutions specifically. I'd be interested in reading this report in full length when I do find the time, it seems like it is one sided and biased in my opinion, and it gives me yet another reason to dislike being a male; I won't however, give into a stupid belief such as that.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLike other commentators, I'd be interested in the overlap. And I'm sure that for more or less dyslexic people, there'd be a huge difference in the activities wether the input is auditory or visual. It's interesting research I'd like to read more about.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMaybe 31 boys were bored with the task. I certainly would be bored. I think that if they were paid to determine the correct answer the results would be different.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf this experiment is true, perhaps the both the editor and the author of the article
should be castigated ala Harvard U .
I wish that when people published findings like these, they would emphasize that what they have found is a difference between the AVERAGE female brain and the AVERAGE male brain, and that the range among the brains of each gender is usually much wider than the difference between the two averages. The gender differences are certainly interesting and worth studying, but we would be wrong to infer from these results that ALL boys should be taught one way and ALL girls another way.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI get the impression that this study reflects American children. Girls are "supposed" to be better than boys at language. A similar study should be made in, say, the Netherlands to see if the conclusions are anything more than a report on educational attitudes in one country.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisKarl Reinhardt
Some of these comments are extending the results of the study. As a speech-language pathologists, I understand the results to be, simply: brain activity is different in girls and boys when processing language. Although it does analyze and extend the findings to say that girls have a distinct advantage in our American classrooms, the scientific findings only report the brain activity difference. This is not new information at all, just confirmed in fMRI.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe article left me with more questions than answer. So the two words are either spoken or visually shown, fMRI shown greater activity (especially in superior temporal gyrus [hearing], inferior frontal gyrus [speech processing], fusiform gyrus [spelling and meaning]). How did the author jump from that to the conclusion that activity corresponds to greater language ability (I am not in the field but just want to understand the scientific method involved). And furthermore, the increase in activity to the conclusion that "It does suggest that girls are learning in a more abstract form...". What is lacking in this article is "are there any difference in answer the question correctly or not". I only read the question asked, the brain activity, but nothing on the difference between the number of girls and boys answer the questions correctly given the words presented orally or visually.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm Director of Euroasia, a specialist provider of foreign language courses in New Zealand. I've observed over the years that we consistently have more girls (OK, women) than boys in our classes. On average, women make up about 60%-70% of our client base, and it's not surprising to see all-female classes at times. I think there are a number of reasons why this is the case. Perhaps language learning is simply more appealing to women. Others would say that girls like the romance associated with learning a second language. It seems like now we have some more compelling biological reasons behind this phenomenon.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm not sure about America, but in Russia mostly girls learn foreign languages, and they are really good at it. I studied at the philological faculty myself, learning languages, and we always called it 'girl's faculty' http://womaninrussia.com/ There were just few boys, some of them gave up, and some got another profession using languages as help for their present job. Besides, most boys are absent-minded, and it's really hard for them to concentrate. I don't know if their abilities get better with time, but those who mastered the language finally in most cases are brilliant.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is very good to helping girls where they can gain more experience and knowledge about world around. There are many schools and help <a href= http://www.girlschools.net/ >centers for girls</a> that provide various opportunities to enhance several skills and to make a creative career in life.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.girlschools.net/