No gender equality for language

Washington, Mar 4: Scientists have provided the biological basis for gender differences in language, by finding that boys and girls rely on different parts of the brain when performing language tasks. The study, conducted by researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Haifa, found that while performing language tasks, the areas of the brain associated with language work harder in girls than in boys.

"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 research team 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 team 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 analyses 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.

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. The article 'Sex Differences in Neural Processing of Language Among Children' is published in the journal Neuropsychologia.

ANI