Gender Differences in Early Communication, Language Acquisition and Development: A Descriptive Study

Abstract

Parents pay a significant attention to the first words children utter. However, first words are not the actual beginning of communication. Much earlier, babies begin to communicate their feeling via making eye contact, pointing, crying, squealing, and other gestures. Furthermore, they perceive language earlier than making others understand them. The aim of this paper is to tackle the variations between the two sexes starting from the stages of language acquisition in normal children, the differences between the two genders in language vocalization within each stage. Next, the distinctions in acquiring a particular communicative competence and the causes behind this difference will be tackled. It has been found that femals show superiority in bubbling, uttering the first word, number of vocabularies, sentence complexity, and clarity of articulation; however, the difference is only one- or two-months exceedance and it disappears by the age of four. Moreover, some domains of superiority in grammar and spelling disappear in adolescence. It is also found that parents play a vital role in the accelerating language acquisition. Boys are more physically played with by the fathers, while girls are more talked to verbally by mothers. Psychological studies of language acquisition argue that girls’ brain develops certain aspects of language faster than the boys’ and vice versa, other aspects are more developed in boys than in girls. Finally, differences in the communicative competence are caused by the styles that children acquire from their parents and/or peer groups