Papafragou, Anna. May 10, 2018. Pragmatic Development.

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A foundational feature of human communication lies in the fact that what a speaker means often goes
beyond the literal meaning of what the speaker says. Within linguistics and philosophy, theories of
meaning capture this fact by distinguishing between linguistically encoded (semantic) and contextually
derived (pragmatic) aspects of communicated meaning. Following the seminal work of Paul Grice and
much subsequent theorizing (Grice, 1975; Horn, 1984; Levinson, 2000; Sperber & Wilson, 1986),
pragmatics is viewed as a form of intention recognition that involves inferentially reconstructing the
meaning that the speaker had in mind and wanted to convey, beyond the literal meaning of an
utterance.

For the child learner, becoming pragmatically competent means becoming able to bridge the gap
between what words and sentences mean and what the speaker intended to communicate by uttering
them in a specific context. Crucially, however, since the meanings of words and sentences themselves
are often unknown to the young child, developing pragmatic competence also involves using intention
recognition to discover semantic meaning—for instance, by consulting the speaker’s eye gaze or mental
state to understand the meaning of a novel word. Thus, from the perspective of the young learner,
pragmatics both enriches linguistic-semantic meaning (e.g., during the interpretation of known words
and structures) and restricts hypotheses about linguistic-semantic meaning (e.g., during the
interpretation of unknown words). Perhaps because pragmatics is so richly and inextricably linked with
the ability to both process and acquire language, and interconnects with a host of linguistic and
cognitive processes, the large literature on pragmatic development has long resisted a neat synthesis.
For example, a considerable body of work shows that very young children, even infants, are exquisitely
attuned to the eye gaze and knowledge of their interlocutors, and use such sophisticated social
reasoning to learn the meaning of novel words (Baldwin, 1991; Bloom, 2000; Southgate, Chevallier, &
Csibra, 2010). Yet, in other respects, children’s ability to infer what others mean appears fragile and
task-dependent, and many pragmatic phenomena that involve indirect or implied meanings—perhaps
most famously metaphor and irony—present difficulties even for older learners (Grigoroglou &
Papafragou, 2017; Matthews, 2014).

In recent years there has been a wealth of exciting research on the nature and acquisition of pragmatics
fueled by several concurrent developments across related fields: new formal models within theoretical
linguistics that explore the semantics-pragmatics interface; more sophisticated psycholinguistic methods
for studying how children (and adults) produce and interpret language in context; integrative efforts
within developmental psychology to relate pragmatic growth to children’s cognitive abilities—especially
the ability to think about others’ mental states (known as theory of mind) and a collection of control
processes such as working memory, inhibition, and task-switching (known as executive function); and
more theoretically oriented approaches to the pragmatic profile of special populations such as
individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) that are known to face social and communicative
challenges. Current work on how children acquire pragmatic competence builds on these new
approaches to understand both children’s early sensitivity to pragmatic principles and their growing
ability to implement these principles across different pragmatic phenomena. This work also points to
several mechanisms that allow children to overcome early limitations and become fully adult-like,
competent communicators.

With these issues in mind, the present author and the leadership of the Society for Language
Development organized a symposium on the topic of pragmatic development on November 12, 2015, at
Boston University. The invited speakers were Eve Clark, Jesse Snedeker, and David Barner. The goal of
the symposium was to highlight classic and more recent findings and theorizing in this rapidly changing
field, and to promote discussion of where the field should go next. The three speakers were later invited
to prepare articles for a special issue of Language Learning and Development dedicated to pragmatic
development (one of them, Jesse Snedeker, could not contribute a paper at that time.) Danielle
Matthews was also invited to write an article for this issue. The present volume represents a variety of
empirical topics, methods and perspectives that is characteristic of the state of the art in pragmatic
development.

In her article, Eve Clark examines how interactions between children and their caregivers might facilitate
language development, paying special attention to conversational scaffolding or corrections offered by
caregivers and their potential impact on children’s speech. The article makes the important point that
language learning does not happen in a pragmatic and social “vacuum” but is deeply embedded in
conversation, such that conversational dynamics themselves might shape the outcome of language
learning. Clark’s data raise fascinating questions about how exactly children reconstruct what adults
intend every time they correct the children’s language use, given that a correction might implicitly target
any one of the many formal or functional properties of a linguistic token. A further interesting issue is
whether the conversational practices (including caregiver corrections) that Clark describes might vary
across language-learning communities and, if so, what the implications might be for young language
learners.

Danielle Matthews, Hannah Biney, and Kirsten Abbott-Smith offer a comprehensive review of how
individual differences in children’s pragmatic ability relate to their language (mostly, vocabulary, and
grammar) and cognition (especially theory of mind and executive function) in both typical and atypical
populations. This paper takes on the Herculean project of organizing disparate and often conflicting sets
of data from multiple studies that are usually not considered together. The review clearly shows that
linguistic growth and cognitive skills are broadly related to pragmatic development; however, current
evidence does not yet point to associations between the development of specific pragmatic phenomena
and well-defined aspects of linguistic or cognitive performance. The authors conclude by offering many
valuable recommendations for the field, including the need to develop a deeper understanding of the
cognitive presuppositions of specific pragmatic phenomena, a better toolkit of individual differences
measures that follows best practices in the field and a theory-driven way of connecting the two.

Finally, Lara Hochstein, Alan Bale, and David Barner investigate the computation of pragmatic meaning
in individuals with ASD, a group that—as mentioned already—is known to be characterized by social and
communicative deficits. They report that high-functioning adolescents with ASD appear
indistinguishable from neurotypical individuals in some aspects of their pragmatic performance, even
though they do not reliably use speaker knowledge to constrain their pragmatic inferences. This
research supports the growing evidence that ASD is not characterized by global communicative deficits;
rather, the field needs a more nuanced, theoretically informed approach to explain communicative
patterns within sub-groups of this widely variable population. The authors also raise the more
speculative possibility that calculations of inferred meaning in typically developing children might also
selectively draw on speaker knowledge (and might in other cases be computed instead via alternative,
non-Gricean routes). This intriguing possibility needs to be tested more fully by future research.

As is obvious from the breadth of the papers in this special issue, questions about the nature and growth
of pragmatic communication have no simple answer. Pragmatics is not a monolithic entity but a complex
intention-recognition system that interfaces with both language and non-linguistic cognition in several
specific ways. Jointly, the papers in the present issue suggest that new progress in the field will come
from developing precise, theoretically motivated connections between pragmatic mechanisms on the
one hand, and semantic and cognitive mechanisms that underlie individual phenomena (and the specific
tasks used to test them) on the other.

References

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Child Pragmatic Development

ASTA CEKAITE

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278322408_Child_Pragmatic_Development

Child Pragmatic DevelopmentASTA CEKAITE

Language is a tool that children and adults use to act in and explore the social world; to create, develop,
and sustain social relationships; and to engage with others in culturally meaningful activities. Thus,
pragmatic development involves children’s acquisition of communicative competences, that is, learning
how to use language, to communicate and understand others appropriately and effectively in a
widening range of social contexts and activities while assuming increasingly complex social roles (Hymes,
1972). In contrast to children’s development of grammar and syntax, consistently shown to be largely
completed by the age of 5 years, children’s sophisticated mastery of varied conversational skills is a
long-term process. Basic pragmatic skills emerge at quite an early age, but are refi ned and developed
throughout preadolescence and adolescence, over time allowing the child to engage in a constantly
broadening range of social activities, and to become a full-fl edged member of the culture and society.
Indeed, children’s acquisition of communicative com-petence has crucial social and educational
implications. Conversational skills play a major role in a child’s access to interactions with peers and in
forging peer-group relations in the fi rst and second language. Such skills are important in adult–child
relations, qualifying children as interactionally competent students in educational settings, and play a
signifi cant role in shaping children’s written literacy skills.Research Perspectives on Pragmatic
DevelopmentThe study of child pragmatic development is a heterogeneous fi eld that brings together
linguistic pragmatics and child development, and encompasses different traditions and theoretical
perspectives on language and social interaction: socioculturally informed research such as
developmental pragmatics (Ervin-Tripp, Guo, & Lampert, 1990; Ninio & Snow, 1996; Blum-Kulka & Snow,
2002), sociolinguistics (Kyratzis & Guo, 2001), language socialization (Ochs & Shieffelin, 1984), and
developmentally informed approaches to child language acquisition (Berman & Slobin, 1994). Topics
studied within the fi eld of children’s pragmatic development in their fi rst language focus on a broad
range of distinct but inextricably related aspects of communicative competence: the emergence and
development of verbal communicative acts (i.e., speech acts) in young children; the development of
conversational skills; children’s growing sensitivity to the social parameters of talk; and children’s
acquisition of extended discourse genres such as narratives, explanations, defi nitions, and so
forth.Though all the above-mentioned traditions agree that children’s active participation in interactions
with adults is a major driving force behind children’s acquisition of com-municative competence, they
differ in their interests and methodological approaches. Developmental studies track the fundamental
developmental process in the child’s construction of pragmatic abilities. They map the universal route
and rate of children’s communicative development cross-culturally and across ages, grounding their
analysis largely on experimentally elicited or semi-elicited data, that is, children’s performance in
controlled communicative tasks (Hickmann, 2003). Socioculturally informed studies on The Encyclopedia
of Applied Linguistics, Edited by Carol A. Chapelle.© 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by
Blackwell Publishing Ltd.DOI: 10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal0127

2 child pragmatic developmentpragmatic development examine the emergence of communicative skills

longitudinally, on the basis of communicative practices in children’s everyday interactions with adults
and peers. Emphasizing the socially and culturally sensitive nature of conversational norms, such studies
examine how everyday interactions serve as a culturally bounded foundation for children’s learning and
practicing of appropriate language use (Shieffelin & Ochs, 1986; Blum-Kulka, 1997).Conversational Sites
for LearningIn child pragmatics, adult– child and children’s peer interactions are viewed as distinct
interactional and developmental sites: these interactions afford different participant roles,
communicative genres, and various degrees of conversational assistance. Adults generally support
children’s conversational participation by providing a model and scaffolding children’s competent and
equal conversational performance. Peer interactions, on the other hand, reveal children’s pragmatic
abilities in unaided conversational situations. Furthermore, peer talk actively contributes to children’s
pragmatic development: the peer discourse has its own specifi c gains, providing a training ground for
children’s conversational skills, genres, and roles unavailable to children in adult– child conversations,
which are asymmetric with respect to social knowledge and power (Blum-Kulka, Huch-Taglicht, & Avni,
2004).The Emergence and Development of Pragmatic SkillsThe Emergence of Speech Acts in Young
ChildrenStudies investigating the acquisition of verbal communicative acts (speech acts) by children
have traced how very young children, starting from the preverbal stage, use linguistic means to perform
social actions and examine the pragmatic goals they achieve. Notably, even when toddlers use one-word
utterances, they are able to make requests for action and information and to produce statements,
responses, and acknowledgments, combining these utterances with nonverbal means. For instance, the
fi rst verbal requests are designed as a combination of gestures and the name of the object requested,
words such as “more,” “want,” and “gimme” (Ervin-Tripp et al., 1990). By the age of 2.5 years, children
deploy a wide repertoire of communicative acts that gradually become more sophisticated and refi ned.
Over time, children learn the lexicocommunicative and pragmatic means that enable full verbal and
situationally sensitive realization of previously acquired com municative intents such as justifi cations,
promises, prohibitions, challenges, apologies, explanations, refusals, and disagreements (Wells, 1985;
Ninio & Snow, 1996).Children’s Conversational SkillsChildren’s communicative use of language allows
them to respond to and to solicit further speech, thus organizing social interaction as adjacent
responsive and reactive verbal actions that serve as the building blocks of conversation and
intersubjectivity. Studies of children’s conversations examine a complex combination of skills: children’s
mastery of turn-taking procedures, initiation and development of relevant topics, and ability to
recognize and repair breakdowns in mutual understanding.Turn taking concerns the ability to organize
verbal interaction by taking turns, that is, by selecting an appropriate place for one’s verbal contribution
in conversation. Turn-taking procedures are situationally and culturally sensitive, varying depending on
participation frameworks (dyadic or multiparty), activities, and social settings (de Leon, 1998). In the
West, where adults treat children as conversational partners from birth, rudimentary

child pragmatic development 3turn-taking procedures begin to develop long before children’s
linguistic productions do (Trevarthen, 1979). In peer groups, children organize social interactions by
conforming to turn-taking procedures typically by the age of 3 years, although the gaps between their
turns are longer than in adult conversation (Ervin-Tripp, 1979). Multiparty encounters (e.g., family
dinner conversations) constitute complex interactional situations for young children, who (still)
experience diffi culties with the precise timing of their self-selections (Blum-Kulka & Snow, 2002).
Similarly, institutional procedures of turn taking in educational settings are the target of extensive
pragmatic socialization in elementary schooling (Cekaite, 2007).Turn taking is not an isolated
conversational ability: sustaining and developing topically coherent conversational episodes requires the
ability to select turns with contributions that manifest topic relatedness, that is, that respond to and add
novel information to the topic at hand, thereby facilitating further development of the topic and
conversation. In interactions with young children, adults tend to assume the bulk of the conversational
responsibilities for topic development. They ask questions, initiate topics, expand and clarify unclear
utterances, and are able to sustain conversational episodes with 2-year-olds. In children’s peer
conversations, topical coherence and contingent responses are recurrently achieved through varied
means of repetition, sound, and verbal play. Communicative uses of repetitions and partial recyclings
are documented across a broad age range, from 2-year-olds’, preschoolers’ (McTear, 1985), and
preadolescents’ peer interactions (Cekaite & Aronsson, 2004), revealing children’s sophisticated lexical,
syntactic, and prosodic analysis of and responsivity to previous talk. Indeed, effi cient use of (partial)
repetitions is one of the normative prerequisites for competent participation and acceptance in the
communicative practices (arguments, disputes, play) of the peer group (Goodwin, 1990).Children’s
repertoires for maintaining topical coherence develop to include formally and semantically diverse
means, starting as early as 2 years of age (McTear, 1985). Achieving adult-like conversational coherence,
however, has a long developmental trajectory in peer talk. Children continue to improve the topical
relatedness of their conversations throughout adolescence, 10–11-year-olds still producing factually
unrelated turns in their conversations (Dorval & Eckerman, 1984).Smooth running of the conversation
depends on the participants’ abilities to recognize, locate, and repair misunderstandings and
conversational breakdowns (Schegloff, Jefferson, & Sacks 1977). In Western contexts, adults’ requests
for repairs and clarifi cations are tuned to children’s verbal skills, starting at around 1.5– 2 years of age,
when children’s talk increases in both comprehensibility and the richness of lexicosemantic features.
Children’s efforts to repair conversational breakdown are documented before 3 years of age. While
initially children tend to address problems of understanding by simply repeating prob-lematic turns,
older children (3-year-olds) exhibit an increased repertoire of remedial resources, deploying and
answering requests for clarifi cation that target specifi c prob-lematic features of talk, and revising their
utterances accordingly (Ninio & Snow, 1996). Also in peer interactions, children (between 4 and 6 years)
manifest their growing concern with the smooth running of interaction and their abilities to remedy
problems of under-standing (McTear, 1985).Repair skills are at the heart of children’s developing
understanding of the other’s perspective. There appears to be cross-cultural variation in repair
procedures concerning the speaker’s and hearer’s responsibilities for securing mutual understanding
that conforms to the larger set of rules regulating interaction. In Western middle-class contexts, adults’
repair initiations serve multiple functions, both as enhancing mutual understanding and as implicit
socializing procedures concerning the pragmatics of conversation. Given that the primary responsibility
for clarity of communication rests with the speaker, the child-speaker is expected to provide relevant
background information and consistently monitor

4 child pragmatic developmentthe comprehensibility of his or her talk. In contrast, studies from non-
Western contexts have shown different repair practices. For instance, in Japan children are socialized
into “intent listenership”: because the responsibility for mutual understanding is attributed to the
listener, children are expected to develop and deploy interpretative skills and to actively signal
(non)comprehension (Clancy, 1986).Politeness and Social Parameters of Language UseChildren’s
emerging sensitivity to the social parameters of language use constitutes an area of pragmatic research
that examines how and when children learn to be polite, to tune in and modify their language
depending on the social context and role relations with the addressee, as well as how to master various
speech registers and styles.Politeness markers are part of children’s precocious pragmatic skills. In
Western contexts, when children reach the age of 2.6– 3 years, they typically vary the linguistic form of
their requests according to the status and age of the addressee. Children exhibit awareness of the
desirability of using indirect request forms with addressees whose social status and age are higher than
their own (adults and older children/siblings), whereas when speaking with their peers, children deploy
unmitigated imperatives and blunt statements. School-age children (7- to 8-year-olds) clearly extend
their pragmatic repertoires: they utilize formally and semantically diverse means in the realization of
requests as well as understand and design indirect requests and hints that take into account obstacles in
the addressee’s situation (Ervin-Tripp et al., 1990).Children’s peer group activities present an ideal site
for observing and documenting children’s mastery and acquisition of social registers. In pretend play, for
instance, children index and sustain in-character roles using a range of linguistic resources. Indeed, play
serves as a major site for conversational development, providing children with opportunities for using
and perfecting skills in registers that are typically associated with high status, and that are unavailable
for children’s use in supportive, yet asymmetric, adult– child inter-actions. Children as young as 4 years
of age engage in script-based play— playing family, teacher–student, or doctor–patient relationships—
vary their use of language styles and registers, exhibiting sensitivity to status and social and gender roles
(Andersen, 1990). Preschool children, boys and girls, master gendered language styles, using them as a
repertoire of speech strategies to achieve particular interactional goals. Instead of relying on the so-
called universal feminine language style, which is associated with mitigation and consensus seeking, girls
adjust and manipulate their language according to participant constellations, using assertive and
unmitigated speech (generally viewed as a masculine assertive and controlling speech style) when
playing in mixed-gender groups (Kyratzis & Guo, 2001). While young children rely largely on register-
relevant prosodic resources, in school-age children interactions and different social roles are marked
and sustained collaboratively through register-relevant lexical means (Hoyle, 1998). Over time, varying
language registers and styles are perfected and deployed instrumentally in preadolescents’ and
adolescents’ identity work as resources marking their affi nity to class, ethnicity, gender categories, or
youth culture (Rampton, 1995).In multilingual children, sensitivity to language choice emerges before
the age of three, when children start accommodating their language choice to the addressee’s language
preference (Fantini, 1985). Pragmatic functions of language alternation develop throughout school age,
where children refi ne skills concerning how to use contrasting languages for managing social relations—
for instance, deploying code switching as a power-wielding device (Jørgensen, 1998).

child pragmatic development 5Extended Discourse GenresChildren’s acquisition of extended

discourse genres— narratives, explanations— is a rela-tively well-charted area of children’s pragmatic
development. In narratives, temporally distant events are described in a way that clarifi es the causal
relations between them. In contrast to talk, which is embedded within the here-and-now activity, when
engaged in storytelling the child cannot rely on the hearer sharing experiences of the same event and
must adhere to the pragmatic requirements of adjusting to the listener’s knowledge and point of view.
As sustained and decontextualized forms of talk, narratives require the structuring of information in
linguistically and cognitively coherent and explicit ways, and involve basic skills of importance to school-
related spoken and written literacy.Studies on children’s narratives follow two distinct research
traditions. Socioculturally informed research investigates children’s naturally occurring narratives and
their narrative socialization in everyday discursive events. Thus, rudimentary narratives— children’s
attempts to converse about remote topics and non-present people and things— are identifi ed very
early, before the age of 2. In everyday conversations, narratives are collaboratively accomplished, and
adults scaffold children’s structured, audience-sensitive presentation of narrative information. By
monitoring the audience for comprehension, assessments, and responses, children learn to organize
narratives, choose tellable topics, and adopt appro-priate affective and moral stances, thus adapting to
cultural criteria for successful narrative performance (Blum-Kulka, 1997).Developmental studies map the
universal route of children’s narrative development cross-culturally and across ages, assessing the well-
formedness of children’s autonomous, adult-unsupported narrative performance. Using highly
constrained elicited narratives—asking children from different age groups and different languages to
narrate a sequence of events in a wordless picture book— such studies map the general progression in
the development of narrative structures and cohesion, including the development of linguistic forms for
encoding the functions of temporality, causality, person, and spatial reference (Berman & Slobin,
1994).Other forms of extended discourse that are considered part of a literate or academic register—
explanations, arguments— are explored as recurrent features of peer talk and play (Aukrust, 2004). In
the argumentative discourse between peers, young children display well-formed and convincing
arguments, which they use to make their points (Zadunaisky-Erlich & Blum-Kulka, 2010). Peer talk thus
incorporates both child-unique discursive strategies and strategies that echo discursive conventions
from the adult culture, enabling the refi nement of both.ConclusionsChildren’s pragmatic competence—
their knowledge of how to confi gure a range of com-municative resources in specifi c discursive
practices—is developed and refi ned through participation in family, peer, and educational interactions,
which serve as a means and motivation for skillful and strategic language use. By investigating both
universal and culture-specifi c features of children’s interactional skills, studies on pragmatic develop-
ment seek to describe and detail how children learn to use language as an effi cient tool for social
action.SEE ALSO: Classroom Research on Pragmatics; Conversation Analysis and Child Language
Acquisition; Family Discourse; Narrative Discourse; Politeness; Pragmatic Competence in Multilingual
Contexts; Pragmatics and Culture; Pragmatic Socialization; Speech Acts Research

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York, NY: Cambridge University Press.Rampton, B. (1995). Crossing: Language and ethnicity among
adolescents. London, England: Longham.Schegloff, E. A., Jefferson, G., & Sacks, H. (1977). The
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child pragmatic development 7Schieffelin, B., & Ochs, E. (Eds.). (1986). Language socialization across
cultures. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.Trevarthen, C. (1979). Instincts for human
understanding and for cultural cooperation: Their development in infancy. In M. von Cranach, K. Foppa,
W. Lepenies, & D. Ploog (Eds.), Human ethology. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.Wells,
G. (1985). Language development in the pre-school years. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University
Press.Zadunaisky-Erlich, S., & Blum-Kulka, S. (2010). Peer talk as a “double opportunity space”: The case
of argumentative discourse. Discourse in Society, 21, 211–33.Suggested ReadingsAronsson, K., & Thorell,
M. (1999). Family politics in children’s play directives. Journal of Pragmatics, 31, 25– 47.Ervin-Tripp, S.
M. (2001). The place of gender in developmental pragmatics: Cultural factors. Research on Language in
Social Interaction, 34, 131–47.Foster, S. H. (1995). The communicative competence of young children.
London, England: Longman.Garvey, C. (1984). Children’s talk. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.Nelson, C. (1996). Language in cognitive development: Emergence of the mediated mind. New
York, NY: Cambridge University Press.Ochs, E., & Shieffelin, B. (1983). Acquiring conversational
competence. London: Routledge.Slobin, D. I., Gerhardt, J., Kyratzis, A., & Guo, J. (Eds.). (1996). Social
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Front Psychol. 2015; 6: 1874.

Published online 2015 Dec 2. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01874

PMCID: PMC4667010

PMID: 26696938

Sex Differences in Language Across Early Childhood: Family Socioeconomic Status does not Impact Boys
and Girls Equally

Stéphanie Barbu,1,* Aurélie Nardy,2 Jean-Pierre Chevrot,2,3 Bahia Guellaï,1,4 Ludivine Glas,1 Jacques
Juhel,5 and Alban Lemasson1,3

Author information Article notes Copyright and License information Disclaimer

This article has been cited by other articles in PMC.

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Abstract

Child sex and family socioeconomic status (SES) have been repeatedly identified as a source of inter-
individual variation in language development; yet their interactions have rarely been explored. While
sex differences are the focus of a renewed interest concerning emerging language skills, data remain
scarce and are not consistent across preschool years. The questions of whether family SES impacts boys
and girls equally, as well as of the consistency of these differences throughout early childhood, remain
open. We evaluated consistency of sex differences across SES and age by focusing on how children (N =
262), from 2;6 to 6;4 years old, from two contrasting social backgrounds, acquire a frequent
phonological alternation in French – the liaison. By using a picture naming task eliciting the production
of obligatory liaisons, we found evidence of sex differences over the preschool years in low-SES children,
but not between high-SES boys and girls whose performances were very similar. Low-SES boys’
performances were the poorest whereas low-SES girls’ performances were intermediate, that is, lower
than those of high-SES children of both sexes but higher than those of low-SES boys. Although all
children’s mastery of obligatory liaisons progressed with age, our findings showed a significant impeding
effect of low-SES, especially for boys.

Keywords: language acquisition, gender, SES, phonological development, French liaison, preschoolers

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Introduction

Language is one of mankind’s key abilities and a universal feature of human development; primary
emphasis has therefore often been placed on documenting universal processes of language acquisition
by focusing on children’s achievement of milestones, relegating inter-individual variation to the
background. However, time courses of language acquisition vary greatly among children. These
variations, far from being an awkward background noise, are relevant for understanding the
mechanisms that underpin language acquisition by providing a window onto the correlates and causes
of language development (Bates et al., 1995). Family socioeconomic status (SES) and child sex have been
repeatedly pointed to as sources of inter-individual variation in language development. While studies on
family SES have rovided consistent findings about the detrimental effect of lower-SES in various
language skills, this has not been the case for studies looking at the sex of the child. Despite widely held
beliefs about sex differences in language development, with the prevalent stereotype being that boys
lag behind girls, empirical evidence is mixed. There are also inherent problems in interpreting published
data on child sex effect. These derive from the variety of study designs, the different language domains
examined, and the heterogeneous populations studied (in terms of participants’ ages and SES, in
particular) which make interpretation and comparison extremely difficult. Whether child sex is a
meaningful source of variation in language abilities has thus remained a matter of debate across the
decades, considered important by some (Maccoby and Jacklin, 1974; Fenson et al., 1994), but negligible
by others (Hyde and Linn, 1988; Hyde, 2005; Wallentin, 2009); discrepancies between studies and
inconsistent findings undoubtedly fuel the continuing debate. While family SES and child sex have both
been the focus of a great deal of research, less attention has been directed toward understanding how
these factors interact across ages in order to account for between-child differences in language
development. This knowledge is important in order to go beyond the current debate on the mere
existence of sex-related differences in language and to improve our understanding of the detrimental
effect of lower-SES in relation to child sex. In this perspective, the aim of the present study was to
investigate whether sex differences are consistent across socioeconomic subgroups and whether family
SES impacts children of both sexes equally, by comparing children’s language skills at the two
extremities of the socioeconomic strata across a wide age range covering the preschool years.

Family SES has been repeatedly identified as a highly significant predictor of language development
(Hoff, 2003; Huttenlocher et al., 2010; Rowe, 2012). SES differences, beginning within the second year of
life (Fenson et al., 1994; Fernald et al., 2013) and widening over time (Huttenlocher et al., 2010;
Zambrana et al., 2012; Fernald et al., 2013), have been found for vocabulary and syntax skills in both
production and comprehension across preschool years (Huttenlocher et al., 2002; Fish and Pinkerman,
2003; Le Normand et al., 2008; Zhang et al., 2008) and school years (Hart and Risley, 2003; Reynolds and
Fish, 2010). As lower SES is associated with poorer language outcomes, low-SES is seen as a risk factor
impairing early language development and delaying later school achievement. Given these
developmental outcomes, information concerning consistency of sex differences across the
socioeconomic strata and how environmental experiences affect children in relation to their sex is an
important issue.

With regard to sex differences in language development, a growing number of recent studies report a
consistent girl advantage across the first 30 months of life for various aspects of language, from early
communicative gestures (Özçalışkan and Goldin-Meadow, 2010) to early vocabulary growth
(Huttenlocher et al., 1991; Bauer et al., 2002), morphosyntactic growth (Hadley et al., 2011), and
vocabulary size and syntactic complexity (Fenson et al., 1994; Galsworthy et al., 2000; Lutchmaya et al.,
2002b; Van Hulle et al., 2004; Berglund et al., 2005; Kern, 2007; Westerlund and Lagerberg, 2008;
Bouchard et al., 2009; Lovas, 2011; Simonsen et al., 2014). These early differences are evidenced across
a wide-range of languages, countries, and ecological settings (Bornstein and Cote, 2005; Eriksson et al.,
2012: in 10 European language communities including French) and mostly in mixed-SES samples.
However, these early differences are not systematically found across studies in all language skills; better
performances by girls have been reported more consistently for vocabulary production. The girls’
advantage is also likely to be small, with child sex explaining only a small amount of the variance (Fenson
et al., 1994; Galsworthy et al., 2000; Berglund et al., 2005; Reilly et al., 2007). When considering the real-
life consequences of sex stereotypes about language, this suggests that the actual sex difference is not
sufficiently large to justify the widespread belief that late development of language in a boy is no cause
for concern, as evidenced by physician referral practices for children with developmental delay (Sices et
al., 2004). Nevertheless, these studies show that when a sex difference is found, it is always in the same
direction with girls acquiring language more rapidly than boys during the first years of life.

Evidence remains scarce and is less consistent over the preschool years. First of all, there are fewer
studies of preschool years compared to the ever growing number of studies focusing on the early years
of language development, thanks to the international adaptation of parental inventories in various
languages and countries. Using various design and language measures in mixed-SES samples, these
studies have reported sex differences up to 36 months for overall language comprehension (Zambrana
et al., 2012) and lexical and grammatical skills (Zhang et al., 2008), but not after that age (Le Normand et
al., 2008; Farrant et al., 2013), as boys seem to catch girls up when approaching 3 years old (Simonsen et
al., 2014). Longitudinal surveys show a girls’ advance in vocabulary growth during the rapid period of
acceleration from 14 to 26 months of age (Huttenlocher et al., 1991), but not later on during the
preschool years whether in production (Huttenlocher et al., 2010: from 14 to 46 months) or in
comprehension (Rowe, 2012: from 30 to 54 months). On the other hand, in studies focusing on middle-
SES families, a small but consistent advantage has been found for girls for almost all language measures
assessed between 2 and 6 years old, but not before or after these ages (Bornstein et al., 2004).
Therefore, sex differences have not consistently been found throughout childhood. Whether studies
found sex differences or not seems at least in part to depend on children’s ages and family SES.

A few studies have, however, considered the impact of child sex and SES concurrently in order to assess
which demographic factors are significant predictors of language development and how they contribute
to individual variation across ages. When considering large cohorts of young children in mixed-SES
samples, studies have shown that during the first 2 years of life, child sex is the most influential factor
whereas family SES does not contribute significantly to vocabulary production (Fenson et al., 1994;
Berglund et al., 2005; Reilly et al., 2007; Westerlund and Lagerberg, 2008). Around 3 years of age, both
child sex and family SES make a small but significant contribution to vocabulary skills, but not
systematically to syntactic skills, with girls and high-SES children having better performances (Fenson et
al., 1994; Zhang et al., 2008). At later ages during the preschool years, family SES become a strong
predictor of vocabulary and syntactic growth, contrary to child sex that is no longer significant
(Huttenlocher et al., 2010; Rowe, 2012). Therefore, the relative influence of demographic factors on
language changes with age across childhood; the association between SES and vocabulary gets stronger
over the course of time (Fenson et al., 1994; Hoff-Ginsberg, 1998) while the influence of child sex seems
to attenuate after 3 years of age.

By focusing on low-income populations, some studies nevertheless suggest that the girls’ advance may
be consistent across early childhood and beyond, at least for children from lower-SES. Girls from low-
income populations showed better vocabulary and syntactic skills than boys in spontaneous speech in
the first years of life (Morisset et al., 1995). They also outperformed boys in standardized evaluations
from kindergarten to middle childhood (Locke et al., 2002; Fish and Pinkerman, 2003; Reynolds and Fish,
2010). The inconsistency of sex differences in the literature thus also calls into questions the
representativeness of samples in studies based on mixed-SES samples or collapsed demographic groups.
As noted repeatedly (Fenson et al., 1994; Simonsen et al., 2014), families at the low end of the
socioeconomic scale are quite under-sampled even in large cohorts of children as attrition is higher in
low-SES. It is therefore important to consider possible interaction between child sex and family SES.

While a few studies have simultaneously assessed the contribution of child sex and family SES to
language development, studies looking at how these factors interact are even more rare. One
longitudinal survey has investigated overall language comprehension between 18 and 36 months (using
a short maternal report composed of five items for 18 months and seven items for 36 months) in a large
cohort of diverse SES (Zambrana et al., 2012). The authors show that sex differences increase with
decreasing level of maternal education (one of the common indices used to reflect family SES along with
parental occupations and incomes) and that maternal education has a greater impact on change in
language comprehension across ages in boys than in girls. However, such interaction has not been
reported for other language skills, whether in younger children (vocabulary production and
comprehension at 18 months: Berglund et al., 2005) or older children (lexical productivity and diversity
between 24 and 48 months: Le Normand et al., 2008). Therefore, whether sex differences are consistent
across the socioeconomic strata after age 3 and how SES impacts child language in relation to their sex
across early childhood remain to be understood.

To address these issues, we focused on how young children acquire a frequent phonological alternation
in French: the liaison. Phonological development remains poorly explored with regard to individual
differences related to children’s sex and SES compared to the extensive literature devoted to vocabulary
and syntax. A liaison consists of the production of a consonant between two words (word1 and word2)
in fluent speech (e.g., [z] in les ours [lezurs] ‘the bears’) when the first word ends with a consonant – not
produced when pronounced in isolation – and the second word starts with a vowel. Word1 determines
the possibility of producing a liaison and its phonetic nature. For example, the word1 un (‘a’/‘one’)
triggers a liaison with the consonant /n/, the word1 deux (‘two’) triggers the liaison with the consonant
/z/ and the word1 petit (‘little’) triggers the liaison with the consonant /t/ whereas joli (‘pretty’) does
not trigger any liaison when it is a word1. Liaisons – with consonants /n/, /z/, and /t/ in 99.7% of the
cases – are frequent in adult speech as a liaison context occurs on average every 16 words (Boë and
Tubach, 1992). They represent a challenging task for young learners in word segmentation as children
have to extract words from the flow of speech when word and syllable boundaries differ, causing young
children to make frequent errors (e.g., les [n]ours instead of les [z]ours “the bears”) (Chevrot et al.,
2009). Liaisons have heuristic value as early word segmentation abilities are related to later language
development (Junge et al., 2012; Singh et al., 2012). They are also a strong indicator of the frequency
effect (i.e., liaisons occur to a greater extent in high-frequency word combinations than in low-
frequency combinations; Bybee, 2001; Dugua et al., 2009) and are thus good candidates for exploring
the influence of the input to which children are exposed.

We focused here on the acquisition of obligatory liaisons, namely liaisons that are systematically
realized by adult speakers (i.e., 100% production rate) whatever their sociodemographic characteristics
and the situational context of speech. Liaisons are obligatory in only four linguistic contexts: after
preverbal clitics (ils arrivent [ilzaAn external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.

Object name is fpsyg-06-01874-i001.jpgiv] ‘they come’), after determiners (un arbre [An external file
that holds a picture, illustration, etc.

Object name is fpsyg-06-01874-i002.jpgnarbAn external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.

Object name is fpsyg-06-01874-i001.jpg] ‘a tree’), in verb + clitic inversion (Comment dit-on? [komAn
external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.

Object name is fpsyg-06-01874-i003.jpgditAn external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.

Object name is fpsyg-06-01874-i004.jpg] ‘how do we say?’), and in some frozen expressions (tout-à-fait
[tutafε] ‘absolutely’; Durand and Lyche, 2008). Liaison acquisition is not easy: it takes approximately 6
years for French children to fully master obligatory liaisons (Chevrot et al., 2007, 2009; Dugua et al.,
2009 for a detailed presentation of a usage-based model of their acquisition and related experimental
and corpus-based studies). Liaison acquisition is not restricted to phonological abilities as its functioning
involves different linguistic levels: phonology, lexicon, morphology, and syntax (Chevrot et al., 2005).
Notably, authors have previously shown that the acquisition of prenominal liaisons (i.e., in the context
determiner + noun) involves interactions between various levels of linguistic knowledge: learning of the
phonological alternation, segmentation, and stabilization of the phonological representation of new
words, and grammatical organization of the nominal phrase (Chevrot et al., 2009; Dugua et al., 2009).
Investigations of the acquisition of liaisons therefore address basic issues in various domains of language
development. With regard to inter-individual variations in the acquisition of obligatory liaisons, family
SES has been shown to impact both their production and evaluation across preschool years, with high-
SES children outperforming low-SES children (Chevrot et al., 2011; Barbu et al., 2013); however, sex
differences have never been studied and nor have their interactions with family SES. To this end, we
investigated rate of liaison acquisition by boys and girls from two contrasting social backgrounds (high-
versus low-SES) across preschool years (age range = 2;6–6;4 years) by using a picture naming task
eliciting the production of obligatory liaisons in determiner + noun sequences.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4667010/
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224886803_Differences_between_girls_and_boys_in_emerg
ing_language_skills_Evidence_from_10_language_communities

Differences between girls and boys in emerginglanguage skills: Evidence from 10

languagecommunitiesM˚arten Eriksson1∗, Peter B. Marschik2, Tiia Tulviste3,Margareta
Almgren4,MiguelP´erez Pereira5, Sonja Wehberg6,Ljubica Marjanoviˇc-Umek7, Frederique
Gayraud8,Melita Kovacevic9and Carlos Gallego

Girls and boys are similar at birth in that neither gender talk. In their well-known reviewof gender
differences in cognitive functioning, Maccoby and Jacklin (1974) concludedthat girls matured more
rapidly in verbal abilities than boys but did not find solid evidencefor this divergence before the age of
11 years. Hyde and Linn (1988) reported a small girladvantage but no developmental trend in a meta-
analysis of gender differences in verbalability including the studies of Maccoby and Jacklin (1974) as well
as later ones. No childyounger than 3 years was included in these studies and participants were
restricted tothose living in the United States or Canada. In a more recent study Bornstein, Hahn,and
Haynes (2004) reported that American girls scored higher than American boys on amultitude of
language measures, including spontaneous speech, caregiver reports, andformal testing from age 2 to 5
years. Thus, although many studies indicate that girls areslightly ahead of boys in verbal skills, there
seems to be some confusion about the timingwhen girls start to outperform boys. Further, the majority
of research on early childlanguage acquisition has been carried out in a mono-language, mono-cultural
setting(English/American). Such studies are particularly vulnerable to confounding variables inquestions
of nature versus nurture. Therefore, comparative studies of child language inmultiple linguistic and
cultural settings are considered to be of special value (Bornstein,2002; Bornstein et al., 2004). The
present study extends previous research on genderdifferences in language by investigating emerging
language skills in a large sample ofchildren from 10 non-English language communities, thereby making
it less vulnerableto cultural and linguistic biases. Both differences in mean language skills and
differencesin variability between girls and boys will be studied.Gender differences in language for
children before age 3Comprehensive studies on gender differences in verbal ability for children below
theage of 3 years have mainly been performed with parent report instruments, such asthe MacArthur-
Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) (e.g., Fensonet al., 1994, 2007). Based on the CDI
norming study, Fenson and colleagues (1994,2007) reported a girl advantage that accounted for about
1–2% of the variance in a studythat included 2,550 American children aged 0.08–2.06 (year; months).
The girl advantageconcerned gestures as well as vocabulary comprehension and vocabulary
production.However, an interaction between gender and age (the difference increasing with age)was
only reported for vocabulary production and only in children aged 0.08–1.04. Thescarcity of reported
interactions between gender and age on language skills is surprisingbecause gender differences are
recurrently reported and an interaction with age is to beexpected for any emerging skill in which girls
and boys are going to differ. In anotherlarge-scale study based on a short version of the CDI, Galsworthy,
Dionne, Dale, andPlomin (2000) found a girl advantage in a study of over 3,000 2-year-old British
childrenthat accounted for about 3% of the variance in vocabulary production. Thus, meta-analyses and
large-scale parental reports suggest that there is a consistent girl advantagein early language
acquisition, at least for children acquiring English. This advantage hasonly been reported occasionally to
interact with age.The CDI instrument has been adapted and normed for several non-English culturesand
languages. The results from these norming studies are complex concerning differ-ences between girls
and boys. Many reported a girl advantage for at least one languageskill, primarily word production (for
Danish, Bleses et al. 2008; for Estonian, Tulviste,2007; for French, Kern, 2007; for Slovene, Marjanoviˇc-
Umek, Fekonja, Kranjc, & Bajc,2008; for Spanish, Gallego & Mariscal, 2008), more rarely for word
comprehension(for Basque, Garc´ıa, Ezeizabarrena, Almgren, & Errarte, 2005; for Danish, Bleses et al.,

328 M˚arten Eriksson et al.2008) and gestures (for Danish, Bleses et al., 2008; for Swedish, Eriksson &
Berglund,1999). In contrast, no gender difference was reported by Jackson-Maldonado andcolleagues
among children acquiring Mexican-Spanish (Jackson-Maldonado, Thal, Bates,Marchman, & Gutierrez-
Clellen, 1993), by Berglund and Eriksson (2000) for Swedish-speaking children or by Kern & Gayraud
(2007) for preterm children acquiring French.However, some of these studies are limited by small
sample size and the inclusion ofage is inconsistent (different age intervals are used, if age is included at
all). Because ageexplains a major part of the variance in children’s language skills, it is crucial to
includeage in a consistent way in statistical models.Few cross-linguistic and cross-cultural studies on
early language acquisition have beenperformed in relation to gender differences. In one such rare study,
Bornstein and Cote(2005) reported that girls aged 1.08 had larger vocabularies than boys of the same
ageacross languages as well as urban and rural settings. The study was conducted in threecountries
comparing children from the United States, Argentina, and Italy.Social explanations to gender
differences in languageMany theories of gender differences (e.g., the gender role socialisation theory by
Jacklin& Baker, 1993 or the social role theory by Eagly, Wood, & Diekman, 2000) stress theinfluence of
the social environment on various cognitive domains, including language.For example, parents typically
choose gender-typed toys even for very young children(Fagot, 1995). Caldera, Huston, and O’Brian
(1989) argued that the action-orientedtoys, more likely bought for boys, do not stimulate language in
the same way as themore caring-oriented toys normally bought for girls. In response to action play,
parentsmainly produced animated sounds and verbal corrections as compared to caring play inwhich
parents produced more verbal interactions in forms of comments and questions.Similarly, Bornstein and
colleagues, (Bornstein, Haynes, Pascual, Painter, & Galperin,1999; Suizzo & Bornstein, 2006) found that
mothers of boys in Argentina, France, andthe United States engaged in more exploratory play than did
mothers of girls, andmothers of girls engaged in more symbolic play than did mothers of boys.
Correspondingdifferences were also found in the amount of exploratory and symbolic play girls andboys
themselves engaged in. This is important because several studies have shown thatamount of symbolic
play in children is highly related to more advanced language (e.g.,Bates, Benigni, Bretherton, Camaioni,
& Volterra, 1979; Lyytinen, Poikkeus, & Laakso,1997). Hence, there is a multitude of social factors that
may contribute to differentacquisition of language among girls and boys. Because the particular mix of
thesefactors is expected to vary among different language communities (Best & Williams,1997), gender
differences in early language skills are consequently also expected to varyamong language communities
if caused by the social environment. (The term languagecommunity is used throughout this paper to
refer to the specific linguistic forms andstructures constituting a specific language as well as language as
an expression ofculture. Language is the prime medium for a culture to express itself. The
independencethat languages can have from national borders is also acknowledged by the term.)One
purpose of the present study is to test the robustness of the gender effect inlanguage by comparing
early language skills between girls and boys in different languagecommunities.The greater male
variability hypothesisSince the days of Ellis (Ellis, 1894), it has been argued at times that men are
morevariable than women in cognitive functioning, which is often referred to as the greater

Differences between girls and boys in early language 329male variability hypothesis (i.e., greater
variability among males in intelligence). Theevidence for this hypothesis varies. Arden and Plomin (2006)
found support for greatervariance of intelligence among boys at age 3 to 10 but not at age 2.
Homogeneity ofvariance between genders has usually been found for most verbal tests (see
Feingold,1992 for a review). Thus, inconsistent support for the greater male variability hypothesiscould
either depend on the investigated age period, on the cognitive domain, or both.Knowledge of equal or
unequal variance between genders might have important appliedconsequences in determining cut-offs
in screening programs. For example, boys are oftenover-represented in the lower percentiles when
screening for language delay (Law, Boyle,Harris, Harkness, & Nye, 1998). This observation might reflect a
lower mean performancein the measured language skills among boys in comparison with girls, a greater
variabilityamong boys, or both. Whereas equal means and equal variance between genders wouldcall
for unisex norms, findings of equal means and heterogeneous variance, or differentmeans (with or
without a difference in variance) would be a more complicated matter.It might indicate that one gender
is more vulnerable and, therefore, more in need forspecial interventions and unisex norms should be
kept, or that unisex norms wouldresult in many false positives within the gender with many individuals
in the lower tail(boys) and separate norms should be used instead. Long-term follow-ups of girls
andboys at the lower tail of each gender would be needed to delineate these alternatives
ifheterogeneous variance or homogeneous variance and a difference in means are found.Hence, the
male variability hypothesis is not only of mere historical interest but alsohas current relevance for
clinical practice. Therefore, another purpose of the presentstudy is to test the hypothesis that boys are
more variable than girls in language skills atlanguage onset.The present studyThis study extends earlier
research on gender differences by merging data frompreviously published studies on early language
skills in girls and boys from 10 non-English European language communities. The inclusion of both
language communityand age as independent variables in the analyses and in interaction with gender
allowsus to control for these variables in a coherent way. Variety of differences between girlsand boys
across the 10 language communities (expressed as an interaction betweengender and language
community) would be evidence of causes within the languagecommunities, for example in terms of
linguistic variables or social variables such asdifferent ways to raise and talk to girls and boys.
Neurodevelopmental factors such asearlier brain lateralization in girls (Crow, 1998) do certainly not
differ across languagecommunities and could not account for such a result.In summary, this study tests
the following four hypotheses: (1) girls are ahead ofboys in emerging language skills; (2) the gender
difference in language interacts withlanguage community; (3) the gender difference in language
interacts with age group;and (4) young boys are more variable in language skills than young
girls.MethodThis study is a synthesis of normed data from previously published studies (see
LanguageCommunities for references). All participants were assessed with adapted versions ofthe
MacArthur-Bates CDI.
330 M˚arten Eriksson et al.Ta b l e 1 . Number of girls and boys over two CDI forms and 10 language
communities (N=13,783)Language community Words and gestures Words and sentencesGirls Boys Girls
BoysAustrian German 72 42 266 147Basque 225 217 494 481Croatian 125 125 179 197Danish 848 864
1477 1386Estonian 182 190 325 314French 275 273 346 317Galician 190 186 348 352Slovene – – 443
484Spanish 223 189 296 297Swedish 241 224 473 420Total 2381 2310 4697 4395ParticipantsIn total,
13,783 children from 10 European language communities contributed datato this study. Of these 13,783
children 4,691 were aged 0.08–1.04 and assessed withadapted versions of the Words and Gestures form
(W&G) of the CDI. The remaining9,092 children were aged 1.04–2.06 and assessed with adapted
versions of the Wordsand Sentences form (W&S) of the CDI. The proportion of girls in each age group
was51%. The proportion of girls in the different samples varied at most 3% from the totalproportion
with the exception of Austrian girls who were considerably over-represented,constituting 63% and 64%
for W&G and W&S, respectively (Table 1). Birth order wasevenly distributed over girls and boys. In the
infant sample (assessed with W&G), 48.3%of the girls and 48.1% of the boys were firstborns. For the
toddler sample (assessed withW&S), 53.2% of the girls and 52.8% of the boys were firstborns. Among
both infants andtoddlers, 11.8% of the girls were bilingual whereas 10.9% of the infant boys and
12.2%of the toddler boys were bilingual.Measures and procedureWord comprehension and production
in infants were assessed with adapted versions ofthe W&G form and word production in toddlers was
assessed using adapted versionsof the W&S form. These forms have a checklist format enabling a parent
to mark theparticular words the child presently understands or produces. The words are groupedby
semantic category to facilitate retrieval. In addition, a similar checklist in the adaptedW&G forms
assessing children’s first communicative gestures was used. Parents’ answer(yes/no) to the question of
whether the child combined words was assessed by theadapted W&S forms. The number of items varied
in the versions adapted to differentlanguage communities. The number of gestures varied between 11
and 13 words, thevocabulary checklist in the adapted W&G form varied between 303 (Spanish) and
688(Austrian German) words, and in the adapted W&S between 588 and 725 words. Amajor cause of
the difference in length in the adapted W&G forms was that the Austrianinfant (W&G) and toddler
(W&S) forms consisted of almost identical number of items.Minor causes of differences in length were
due to linguistic and cultural characteristics.For example, the number of pronouns and kinship terms
differs markedly between

... Gender differences have also been noticeable in previous studies with artificial conversational
partners, both with robots [37], [38], [39] and with chatbots [5], [6]. The exact reasons why such
differences exist remain unclear, but it is possible that this would be related to observed differences in
the rate at which boys and girls learn language skills, girls being generally ahead of boys [40]. In addition
to this, the automatic anthropomorphization of robots (assuming it behaves somewhat human-like), is
usually enough for people to consider them as social agents [30], [31]. ...

... The results indicate that there is a significant difference between participants of different gender in
this condition. This is compatible with the fact that females have higher language skills than males [40].
The additional information provided by the artificial agent might have simply not added as much
cognitive load for females than it did for males. ...
... We have also seen what was already observed in the literature, that the response times of male
participants are more influenced by violations of the maxims than female participants. While the reason
behind this is not clear, it is coherent with the findings that females have on average better language
skills than males [40]. ...

Differences between girls and boys in emerging language skills: evidence from 10 language
communities.

Eriksson M1, Marschik PB, Tulviste T, Almgren M, Pérez Pereira M, Wehberg S, Marjanovič-Umek L,
Gayraud F, Kovacevic M, Gallego C.

Author information

Faculty of Health and Occupational Studies, University of Gävle, Sweden. marten.eriksson@hig.se

Abstract

The present study explored gender differences in emerging language skills in 13,783 European children
from 10 non-English language communities. It was based on a synthesis of published data assessed with
adapted versions of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) from age 0.08
to 2.06. The results showed that girls are slightly ahead of boys in early communicative gestures, in
productive vocabulary, and in combining words. The difference increased with age. Boys were not found
to be more variable than girls. Despite extensive variation in language skills between language
communities, the difference between girls and boys remained. This suggests that the difference is
caused by robust factors that do not change between language communities.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22550951

Are there any differences in the development of boys' and girls' brains?

Neuroscientists have known for many years that the brains of men and women are not identical. Men’s
brains tend to be more lateralized—that is, the two hemispheres operate more independently during
specific mental tasks like speaking or navigating around one’s environment. For the same kinds of tasks,
females tend to use both their cerebral hemispheres more equally. Another difference is size: males of
all ages tend to have slightly larger brains, on average, than females, even after correcting for
differences in body size.

Electrical measurements reveal differences in boys’ and girls’ brain function from the moment of birth.
By three months of age, boys’ and girls’ brains respond differently to the sound of human speech.
Because they appear so early in life, such differences are presumably a product of sex-related genes or
hormones. We do know that testosterone levels rise in male fetuses as early as seven weeks of
gestation, and that testosterone affects the growth and survival of neurons in many parts of the brain.
Female sex hormones may also play a role in shaping brain development, but their function is currently
not well understood.

Sex differences in the brain are reflected in the somewhat different developmental timetables of girls
and boys. By most measures of sensory and cognitive development, girls are slightly more advanced:
vision, hearing, memory, smell, and touch are all more acute in female than male infants. Girl babies
also tend to be somewhat more socially attuned—responding more readily to human voices or faces, or
crying more vigorously in response to another infant’s cry—and they generally lead boys in the
emergence of fine motor and language skills.

Boys eventually catch up in many of these areas. By age three, they tend to out-perform girls in one
cognitive area: visual-spatial integration, which is involved in navigation, assembling jigsaw puzzles, and
certain types of hand-eye coordination. Males of all ages tend to perform better than females on tasks
like mental rotation (imagining how a particular object would look if it were turned ninety degrees)
while females of all ages tend to perform better than males at certain verbal tasks and at identifying
emotional expression in another person’s face. (It is important to emphasize that these findings describe
only the average differences between boys and girls. In fact, the range of abilities within either gender is
much greater than the difference between the “average girl” and the “average boy.” In other words,
there are plenty of boys with excellent verbal skills, and girls with excellent visual-spatial ability. While it
can be helpful for parents and teachers to understand the different tendencies of the two sexes, we
should not expect all children to conform to these norms.)

Genes and hormones set the ball rolling, but they do not fully account for sex differences in children’s
brains. Experience also plays a fundamental role. Consider, for example, the “typical” boy, with his more
advanced spatial skills; he may well prefer activities like climbing or pushing trucks around—all of which
further hone his visual-spatial skills. The “typical” girl, by contrast, may gravitate more toward games
with dolls and siblings, which further reinforce her verbal and social skills. It is not hard to see how initial
strengths are magnified—thanks to the remarkable plasticity of young children’s brains—into significant
differences, even before boys and girls begin preschool.

But this remarkable plasticity also provides parents and other caregivers with a wonderful opportunity
to compensate for the different tendencies of boys and girls. For example, it is known that greater
verbal interaction can improve young children’s language skills. So the “typical boy” may especially
benefit from a caregiver who engages him in lots of conversation and word play. On the other hand, the
“typical girl” may benefit more from a caregiver who engages her in a jigsaw puzzle or building a block
tower—activities that encourage her visual-spatial integration. The point is not to discourage children
from sex-typical play (since pushing trucks or playing with dolls are great activities for any young child),
but to supplement those activities with experiences that encourage the development of many
competences.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080303120346.htm

Boys' And Girls' Brains Are Different: Gender Differences In Language Appear Biological

Date:

March 5, 2008

Source:

Northwestern University

Although researchers have long agreed that girls have superior language abilities than boys, until now
no one has clearly provided a biological basis that may account for their differences.

For the first time -- and in unambiguous findings -- researchers from Northwestern University and the
University of Haifa show both that areas of the brain associated with language work harder in girls than
in boys during language tasks, and that boys and girls rely on different parts of the brain when
performing these tasks.

"Our findings -- which suggest that language processing is more sensory in boys and more abstract in
girls -- could have major implications for teaching children and even provide support for advocates of
single sex classrooms," said Douglas D. Burman, research associate in Northwestern's Roxelyn and
Richard Pepper Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the researchers measured brain activity in 31 boys
and in 31 girls aged 9 to 15 as they performed spelling and writing language tasks.

The tasks were delivered in two sensory modalities -- visual and auditory. When visually presented, the
children read certain words without hearing them. Presented in an auditory mode, they heard words
aloud but did not see them.
Using a complex statistical model, the researchers accounted for differences associated with age,
gender, type of linguistic judgment, performance accuracy and the method -- written or spoken -- in
which words were presented.

The researchers found that girls still showed significantly greater activation in language areas of the
brain than boys. The information in the tasks got through to girls' language areas of the brain -- areas
associated with abstract thinking through language. And their performance accuracy correlated with the
degree of activation in some of these language areas.

To their astonishment, however, this was not at all the case for boys. In boys, accurate performance
depended -- when reading words -- on how hard visual areas of the brain worked. In hearing words,
boys' performance depended on how hard auditory areas of the brain worked.

If that pattern extends to language processing that occurs in the classroom, it could inform teaching and
testing methods.

Given boys' sensory approach, boys might be more effectively evaluated on knowledge gained from
lectures via oral tests and on knowledge gained by reading via written tests. For girls, whose language
processing appears more abstract in approach, these different testing methods would appear
unnecessary.

"One possibility is that boys have some kind of bottleneck in their sensory processes that can hold up
visual or auditory information and keep it from being fed into the language areas of the brain," Burman
said. This could result simply from girls developing faster than boys, in which case the differences
between the sexes might disappear by adulthood.

Or, an alternative explanation is that boys create visual and auditory associations such that meanings
associated with a word are brought to mind simply from seeing or hearing the word.

While the second explanation puts males at a disadvantage in more abstract language function, those
kinds of sensory associations may have provided an evolutionary advantage for primitive men whose
survival required them to quickly recognize danger-associated sights and sounds.
If the pattern of females relying on an abstract language network and of males relying on sensory areas
of the brain extends into adulthood -- a still unresolved question -- it could explain why women often
provide more context and abstract representation than men.

Ask a woman for directions and you may hear something like: "Turn left on Main Street, go one block
past the drug store, and then turn right, where there's a flower shop on one corner and a cafe across the
street."

Such information-laden directions may be helpful for women because all information is relevant to the
abstract concept of where to turn; however, men may require only one cue and be distracted by
additional information.

Burman is primary author of "Sex Differences in Neural Processing of Language Among Children." Co-
authored by James R. Booth (Northwestern University) and Tali Bitan (University of Haifa), the article
will be published in the March issue of the journal Neuropsychologia and now is available online at
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2007.12.021.

https://study.com/academy/lesson/the-effects-of-gender-on-language.html

The Effects of Gender on Language

Instructor: Clio Stearns

Gender can have a profound effect on how people acquire, use, and think about language. This lesson
presents and discusses some of the ways that gender can impact how language is acquired.

Why Think About Gender and Language?

When you look around, you might notice that for the most part, masculinity and feminity are
represented in a number of different ways. From the way people dress, to how they wear their hair, all
of these choices are sending a message about their own relationship to the social construct of gender, or
how a person identifies themselves in relation to the categories of man and woman. Gender is so tied to
how we express ourselves that it can even impact the words we use every day!
This may come as a surprise. At first, gender might seem irrelevant to language. However, researchers
have repeatedly demonstrated a strong relationship between gender and how language is acquired,
developed, and used. Gender seems to have an impact on language development even in very different
historical and cultural contexts.

Gender and Language Acquisition

First of all, gender can play an important part in language acquisition, or how young children learn their
native language. In many societies, babies and toddlers spend more time with female caregivers, so
early language is often initially mimicked from a female speaker.

In most language groups, young girls acquire language on average at a slightly faster rate than boys,
though this tends to even out by middle childhood. Gender differences in language use appear early;
girls are more likely to use language in the context of emotional relationships with others, while boys
more likely to use it to describe objects and events.

On average, girls also learn to read slightly earlier than boys, but this, too, evens out in middle
childhood. Nonetheless, throughout the lifespan, women tend to perform slightly higher than men, on
average, on tests measuring verbal acuity and performance.

Gender and Language Development and Expression

There are some significant differences in how language develops and how people tend to express
themselves based on gender.

For example, as a whole, women tend to use language more relationally, or in the context of close
relationships with others. Women also tend to have a wider-range of emotional vocabulary, using
language more readily to describe their feelings and emotional states.

Men, on the other hand, tend to use language more assertively and are more likely to suppress, or hold
back, their emotions. As a result, men tend to not express their emotions through language. It is
important to note that this is a generalization and is by no means applicable to all men and women
worldwide.
The ways men and women use language also vary depending on the language in question. For instance,
some studies note that female speakers of Chinese speak more quietly and in a more passive voice than
male speakers. These differences have not been documented consistently in other languages.