Rinaldi Pasquale, Pasqualetti Patrizio, Volterra Virginia, Caselli Maria Cristina
Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, Italian National Research Council, Rome, Italy.
Department of Public Health and Infectious Diseases, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy.
J Neurosci Res. 2023 May;101(5):643-653. doi: 10.1002/jnr.24914. Epub 2021 Jul 9.
It is a common feeling that girls speak earlier than boys; however, whether or not there are gender differences in early language acquisition remains controversial. The present paper aims to review the research on gender effects in early language acquisition and development, to determine whether, and from which age, an advantage for girls does eventually emerge. The focus is on the production of actions and communicative gestures, and early lexical comprehension and production, by girls and boys. The data from various studies that were conducted with direct and indirect tools suggest that some gender differences in actions, gesture, and lexical development depend on the interactions of different factors. Studies differ in terms of age ranges, sample sizes, and tools used, and the girl advantage is often slight and/or not evident at all ages considered. Statistical significance for gender differences appears to depend on the greater individual variability among boys, with respect to girls, which results in a greater number of boys classified as children with poor verbal ability. Biological (e.g., different maturational rates), neuropsychological (e.g., different cognitive strategies in solving tasks), and cultural (e.g., differences in the way parents relate socially to boys and girls) factors appear to interact, to create feedback loops of mutual reinforcement.
人们普遍感觉女孩比男孩说话早；然而，早期语言习得中是否存在性别差异仍存在争议。本文旨在回顾早期语言习得和发展中性别影响的研究，以确定女孩是否最终会在某个年龄段出现优势。重点在于男孩和女孩的动作和交流手势的产生，以及早期词汇理解和产出。使用直接和间接工具进行的各种研究数据表明，动作、手势和词汇发展方面的一些性别差异取决于不同因素的相互作用。研究在年龄范围、样本大小和使用的工具方面存在差异，而且在所有考虑的年龄段，女孩的优势往往很微小，甚至根本不明显。性别差异的统计学显著性似乎取决于男孩相对于女孩更大的个体变异性，这导致更多男孩被归类为语言能力差的儿童。生物学因素（如不同的成熟速度）、神经心理学因素（如解决任务时不同的认知策略）和文化因素（如父母与男孩和女孩社交方式的差异）似乎相互作用，形成相互强化的反馈循环。
