Posted on 03/05/2008 2:15:27 PM PST by blam
Boys And Girls Brains Are Different: Gender Differences In Language Appear Biological
New research shows that areas of the brain associated with language work harder in girls than in boys during language tasks, and that boys and girls rely on different parts of the brain when performing these tasks. (Credit: iStockphoto/Rich Legg)
ScienceDaily (Mar. 5, 2008) — Although researchers have long agreed that girls have superior language abilities than boys, until now no one has clearly provided a biological basis that may account for their differences.
For the first time -- and in unambiguous findings -- researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Haifa show both that areas of the brain associated with language work harder in girls than in boys during language tasks, and that boys and girls rely on different parts of the brain when performing these tasks.
"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 researchers 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 researchers 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 researchers 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.
To their astonishment, 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.
While the second explanation puts males at a disadvantage in more abstract language function, those kinds of sensory associations may have provided an evolutionary advantage for primitive men whose survival required them to quickly recognize danger-associated sights and sounds.
If the pattern of females relying on an abstract language network and of males relying on sensory areas of the brain extends into adulthood -- a still unresolved question -- it could explain why women often provide more context and abstract representation than men.
Ask a woman for directions and you may hear something like: "Turn left on Main Street, go one block past the drug store, and then turn right, where there's a flower shop on one corner and a cafe across the street."
Such information-laden directions may be helpful for women because all information is relevant to the abstract concept of where to turn; however, men may require only one cue and be distracted by additional information.
Burman is primary author of "Sex Differences in Neural Processing of Language Among Children." Co-authored by James R. Booth (Northwestern University) and Tali Bitan (University of Haifa), the article will be published in the March issue of the journal Neuropsychologia and now is available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2007.12.021.
Adapted from materials provided by Northwestern University, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
Men...not so much.
In men, their brains have a “compass.”
Women...not so much.
Her answer: "The cat threw up today and needs to be de-wormed."
It would be interesting to watch them try that, in these days of transgenderism and confusion.
I can find anything with a map. I am awful at following someone else’s direction. IMO, of course, that’s their fault. :)
MapQuest has been a great boon for me.
Your screen name seems masculine, but that's not very reliable. My screen name, ending in "Cow", sounds feminine, but while I'm no Chuck Norris or General Patton, I'm still definitely a male, and happily so.
Male. Your observations are confirmed.
OTOH, my wife and daughters cannot use a map, but are able to follow directions that leave me totally confused.
Although researchers have long agreed that girls have superior language abilities than boys
Although researchers have long agreed that girls have language abilities superior to boys.
Agree, not a pretty sentence.
The traditional viewpoint is that women are on average better than men verbally. Or at least higher in quantity.
Why males have so greatly outperformed females over the centuries in quality is a very good question. I don’t have any facile answers.
Some of it, without doubt, has especially in the past been due to prejudice. But it seems unlikely that all of the differential can be assigned to this factor.
If women are upset about this differential, the cure is for them to sit down and write great literature. Not to stand up mediocre women writers of yesterday and today and claim that their works were really great literature ignored only because they were women.
It may also be the nature of what they are measuring and how. They may be measuring some component of what it takes to write great literature or be a great speaker rather than the whole range of abilities required. In other words, they may have performed a valid experiment but mischaracterized the result.
It would be a very interesting experiment to do a comparative study of brain functions of men and women who excel in math. Do the women think the same as men or do they think the same way as other women? If there is no qualitative difference between the brain functions of high IQ women and ordinary women then these women would be very unique indeed. That would mean that they would approach problems from a different perspective than their male peers. And often in science and math, that is what it take to make a breakthrough.
Most work in this world, though, does not need to be done, nor is it done, by the elite of the elite
But the most important work is done by the cognitive elite. A few years ago a book titled IQ and the Wealth of Nations explored the relationship between national IQ and national GDP. The correlation is good (for market economies) but, La Griffe Du Lion, the anonymous mathematician who wrote the article I linked to, has done a more detailed study of the issue.
He (or maybe she) has discovered that there is an even better correlation between national GDP and, not the average IQ, but a "smart fraction" of people on the right tail of the bell curve.
It makes sense because it explains so much. Consider a hypothetical nation where every person has an IQ of 100. You cannot become a very effective doctor, engineer or rocket scientist with an IQ of 100 and so such a nation would barely rise above third world status. On the other hand consider a nation such as America with an average IQ of 98. Although it means we have to deal with a lot of problems with the left tail of the bell curve, the genius on the right side more than makes up for it.
Jews have an average IQ about one full standard deviation greater than average and America has more Jews than any other country. More than anything, the small percentage of cognitive elite are the reason America is such an economic powerhouse.
This is a *in general* kind of thing. Just like in general men are taller than women, in general men have more immediate physical strength than women, in general women have greater endurance than men, in general women have a higher pain tolerance than men, in general girls are more verbal at an early age than boys.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t exceptions. If women had the education and opportunity to be in positions of being able to write and speak as men have had for the centuries, you might find women producing comparable works.
My boys were in elementary, middle, high school in the 80s and 90s... Blessedly, they were not only in the gifted/talented programs but their school in OK was the learning lab where all the specialists in math, reading, science, etc. were teaching and planning the curriculum for the entire state.
A friend's son was in a school where 3 teachers in his formative years did NOT like boys. It took a village to help that child catch up to my sons.
All 3 are engineers now.
I find articles like the one we posted to annoying because I'm tired of teachers making excuses for not teaching certain children.
I went through school in Boston. The elementary school I attended can only be described as international. But the nuns had a take no prisoners attitude. Each and every child in that school got into an exam school when they graduated from the 8th grade. And, remarkably, they all spoke, read, and wrote English as if they'd been born here. I know this is true. There were 7 kids in my family -- parents spoke, read, and wrote French. We were only allowed to communicate in English at home as ORDERED by the nuns.
A friend’s son was in a school where 3 teachers in his formative years did NOT like boys. It took a village to help that child catch up to my sons.
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War on the boys I guess, from what I read. We plan to homeschool in the early years for sure . . . daughter is 3 years old now.
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