MALE babies "talk" more in the first year than female babies do, confirmed a new study that analysed more than 450,000 hours of audio recordings of nearly 6,000 babies, as reported in iScience recently.
In general, they found that male infants "talk" more than female infants in the first year.
While the research confirms earlier findings from a much smaller study by the same team, they still come as a surprise.
That's because there's a common and long-held belief that females have an advantage over males in language.
They also have interesting implications for the evolutionary foundations of language, the researchers say.
"Females are believed widely to have a small but discernible advantage over males in language," says D. Kimbrough Oller of the University of Memphis.
"But in the first year, males have proven to produce more speech-like vocalisation than females."
However, male infants' early advantage in language development doesn't last.
"While boys showed higher rates of vocalisation in the first year, the girls caught up and passed the boys by the end of the second year," Oller said.
Overall, the data showed that male infants made 10% more utterances in the first year compared to females.
In the second year, female infants were making about 7% more sounds than males.
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