Gender differences in language are small but matter for disorders

Abstract

Language is omnipresent in human life and therefore also in the brain. Gender differences in language can be signs of cognitive differences, but can also by themselves be the cause for such differences. Females have a slight linguistic advantage to males, but effect sizes are small and gender explains very little of the variance seen in the normal population (1-2%). However, males outnumber females in the lowest 10 th percentile in language tests (2:1), causing males to more often be diagnosed with developmental disorders which rely on tests of language development. Thus, gender differences in language are negligible, if you focus on the whole population, but if you focus on language deficits, gender differences are outspoken. Differences in voice and word-use can be observed among the genders, making it possible to predict gender from these measures with a high degree of certainty. A subtle finding is that women use more 1 st person pronouns. This is also observed in depression which is more prevalent in females, opening up for a potential link. Sex chromosome trisomies are often accompanied by language deficits, but the causes for this are not known. No gender differences are observed in the linguistic symptoms of neurodegenerative disorders. Post-stroke aphasia is more prevalent among women than among men, but this seems to be an age-effect. A link between the brain and gender differences in language is thus missing.

Auditory Processing of the Brain Is Enhanced by Parental Singing for Preterm Infants

“…The sex differences in the efficacy of singing intervention reported by Kostilainen et al (2021) are not easy to interpret. Although gender differences are a highly debated topic, some results suggest that there is a small but noticeable difference in language development that females develop slightly faster than males ( Wallentin, 2020 ). However, it is unknown whether this is due to innate or genetic influences, or environment, since there is evidence that parents talk more to female than male children ( Leaper et al, 1998 ).…”

Gender Differences in Theory of Mind, Empathic Understanding, and Moral Reasoning in an Offending and a Matched Non-Offending Population

“…Findings have suggested that men are less lingually advanced than their female counterparts (Wallentin, 2020), which is said to be further exaggerated by offending status (Winstanley, Webb, & Conti-Ramsden, 2019). Apperly and Butterfill (2009), and more recently Meinhardt-Injac, Daum, Meinhardt and Persike (2018), noted that reflexive-cognitive processes (language) is required to understand the mental state of another person.…”

“…Language development may offer one explanation as to why an interaction between gender and offending status, in relation to verbal ToM, was found only in the male groups. Findings have suggested that men are less lingually advanced than their female counterparts (Wallentin, 2020), which is said to be further exaggerated by offending status (Winstanley et al, 2019). Apperly and Butterfill (2009), and more recently Meinhardt-Injac et al (2018), noted that reflexive-cognitive processes (language) is required to understand the mental state of another person.…”

The relationship between oral language and storytelling prosody in preschool children

“…As mentioned above, male children demonstrated poorer performance on oral language tasks (including language production and receptive vocabulary) than female children. Previous research also found that male children are at higher risk of language disorders than their female peers (Bendel et al, 1989;Norbury et al, 2016;Tseng et al, 2015;Wallentin, 2020). Thus, two separate hierarchical regression analyses were conducted for male and female children.…”

“…After grammatical categories are assigned to words, infants infer probable meanings of novel words, as proposed in the syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis (Gleitman, 1990). Together, prosody helps chunk spoken sentences into small units (e.g., phrases or words), which would in turn enhance sentence parsing (Massicotte-Laforge & Shi, 2015, 2020 and novel word learning (de Carvalho et al, 2019).…”