Baby boys talk more in their first year than baby girls: study

By Pol Allingham via SWNS

Baby boys “talk” more in their first year than girls, according to a major new study.

Chit-chat for young babies includes squeals, vowel-like sounds, growls and short word-like sounds such as “ba” and “aga” - as they get older these noises are replaced with early words and eventually whole phrases and sentences.

Some tots naturally speak more than others, but in general males natter ten percent more in their first year versus females, contrary to the long-standing belief that females have a reliable advantage over men in language.

Despite boys' early start, young girls had overtaken by the end of the second year, making seven percent more sounds.

The University of Memphis, (UM) Tennessee researchers suggest the trend could be linked with an evolutionary theory that infants make sounds early-on to express wellness and improve their odds at surviving.

Boys are more likely to die in the first year than girls, which the experts suggest could explain the gender gap.

Over 450,000 hours of all-day-long recordings of 5,899 infants were studied and experts documented the kids’ precursors to speech, or “protophones”, using a device the size of an iPod.

The recordings spanned their first two years of life and were analyzed automatically.

Dr. Kimbrough Oller, UM, said: “Females are believed widely to have a small but discernible advantage over males in language, but in the first year, males have proven to produce more speech-like vocalization than females.

“While boys showed higher rates of vocalization in the first year, the girls caught up and passed the boys by the end of the second year.

“This is the biggest sample for any study ever conducted on language development, as far as we know.

"We think it may be because boys are more vulnerable to dying in the first year than girls, and given that so many male deaths occur in the first year, boys may have been under especially high selection pressure to produce vocal fitness signals.

“The pressure on special fitness signaling is lower for both boys and girls.

“We anticipate that caregivers will show discernible reactions of interest and of being charmed by the speech-like sounds, indicators that fitness signaling by the baby elicits real feelings of fondness and willingness to invest in the well-being of infants who vocalize especially effectively.

“We wonder how caregivers will react to speech-like sounds of boys and girls.

"But they may have to be told which infants are which, because we don’t even know if sex can be discerned in the vocalizations alone.”

The experts, writing in the journal iScience, add that more work should be done on understanding how caregivers react to baby sounds.