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Updated: Dec 21, 2025

Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization
Published on: April 19, 2017
Infant boys are more vocal than infant girls
D Kimbrough Oller1, Ulrike Griebel1, Dale D Bowman2
1University of Memphis, Memphis, TN 38152, USA; Institute for Intelligent Systems, University of Memphis, Memphis, TN 38152, USA; Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, 3400 Klosterneuburg, Austria.
Abstract:
Although it is generally assumed females have a language advantage over males, Oller et al., studying all-day recordings of 100 infants, found that boys in the first year of life produced more speech-like vocalizations than girls and that the effect size was more than four times larger than the commonly reported female language advantage.
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