Boys are more chatty than girls in the 1st year of life – 06/10/2023 – Science

The most comprehensive study to date of speech development among infants from birth to age 2 has revealed a curious paradox when comparing male and female children.

Apparently, during the first year of life, boys are the most talkative, but this pattern is reversed in the following months, with girls taking the lead in producing sounds and first words.

The data from the work also reinforce the idea that members of our species, in general, come “from the factory” with an almost irrepressible ability to produce spoken language. Most of the time, the nearly 6,000 babies followed by the researchers weren’t interacting with other people when they made their vocalizations. In other words, they “talked” for the simple pleasure of speaking.

Published in the specialized magazine iScience, the survey was coordinated by David Kimbrough Oller, from the University of Memphis, in Tennessee (southern region of the USA).

The researcher and his colleagues worked on more than 450,000 hours of recordings, capturing the sounds emitted by children and their families throughout the day. “This is the largest sample size of any study ever conducted on language development, as far as we know,” he said in a statement.

The mass of data is such that it would be impossible to analyze it manually. Therefore, the Memphis team developed a system that automatically classified the sounds emitted by babies. The objective was to put aside noises such as crying, laughing, coughing, belching and hiccups, taking into account only what specialists call protophones, considered precursors of speech.

The category of protophones includes what we usually call babbling — the “bá-bá-bá” or “tá-tá-tá” that are very reminiscent of syllables of actual words — and also other less defined oral sounds that seem to be an important part of the speech. spoken language learning process.

The automated system groups both protophones and children’s first words into the same category.

The analysis is further subdivided into three aspects. The first, volubility, simply takes into account the greater or lesser willingness of babies to “talk”, counting the protophones they emit throughout the day. The second aspect is that of “conversation shifts”, which considers the extent to which children babble within an interval of up to 5 seconds after an adult says something close to them (but not necessarily addressing them). Finally, the study also counted how many words adults said around babies, to investigate the extent to which this stimulation is related to children’s level of “chattering”.

Data analysis revealed that, in the first year of life, male babies emitted 10% more protophones than female babies, but this advantage was reversed during the second year of life, when girls started to produce 7% more typical speech sounds.

The pattern repeats itself in terms of “talking shifts”, with boys initially more chatty after adults speak, and a reversal of this as babies get older. Everything indicates that this is not an influence of adult stimulation: since birth, parents and relatives talk more with girls than with boys.

The data is relatively surprising because a number of studies of children and adults indicate a slight average female advantage in language resourcefulness across the lifespan, although this varies greatly depending on the exact circumstances of the conversation and other factors.

According to the researchers, a possible hypothesis, based on the theory of evolution, would be that of a link with the higher mortality of boys, especially up to one year of age. In fact, just as adult females tend to live longer, female infants also tend to have lower mortality rates.

“We think that, as boys are more vulnerable in the first year of life, they may be under more selective pressure to produce vocal signals,” suggests Oller. This would increase, for example, the chances of receiving more intense care from the parents, improving the chances of a healthy growth for the boys. There are still no means of directly corroborating this hypothesis, however.