Baby boys ‘talk’ more during the first year of life than girls

During the first year of life, the you drink child “talk” more than girls, and make vowel-like sounds and short sounds like ‘ba’ either ‘aga’ which, over time, end up being replaced by words, phrases and complete sentences.

This finding, published this Wednesday in the iScience magazine, is not surprising, since although some babies “talk” more than others, it was not known that there were differences by sex or that they “talk” more than them. The authors believe the study has interesting implications for the evolutionary foundations of language.

“It is widely believed that females have a small but perceptible advantage over males in language, but in the first year of life males have been shown to produce more speech-like vocalizations than females.”, explains Kimbrough Oller, from the University of Memphis (Tennessee).

However, the precocity of baby boys in language development does not last long, since “girls catch up with and surpass boys by the end of the second year”Oller points out.

Oller and his colleagues were not interested in studying gender differences. Their goal was to observe how language emerges and evolves in childhood, but in 2020 they did a study in which they discovered that boys start to ‘talk’ earlier than girls.

That study was done with few babies but now, by repeating it three years later with a larger number of babies, they have confirmed their conclusions.

The research was carried out with more than 450,000 hours of recordings throughout the day of 5,899 babies that were automatically analyzed to count the expressions of the babies in the first two years of life and the words used by adult caregivers in that time.

“To our knowledge, this is the largest sample of all studies conducted on the development of language”, Oller stresses.

An evolutionary advantage?

Overall, the data showed that baby boys pronounced a 10% more sentences during the first year than the girls and that, in the second year, the opposite occurred: the girls uttered a 7% more sounds than children.

These differences were observed despite the fact that the number of words spoken by the adults caring for the children was higher for girls in both years than for boys.

The researchers suggest that baby boys may vocalize sooner simply because they are more active in general, but the data does not seem to support this, as the increase in vocalizations in baby boys disappears by 16 months, while their increased level of physical activity does not.

But the findings might fit in with an evolutionary theory that babies make so many sounds early on to express their well-being and improve their own chances of survival, Oller suggests.

“We think this may be because boys are more vulnerable to dying in their first year than girls, and since there are so many deaths in children under one year of age, they may have been under particularly high selection pressure to produce vocal signals of well-being.

In the second year of life, when mortality rates drop dramatically across the board, Oller adds, “the pressure on the special signs of aptitude is less, both for boys and for girls”.

Source: EFE