Male babies talk more in first year than female babies: Study

A new study published in iScience has found that male infants talk more than female infants in the first year It is known that young babies emit a lot of squeals vowellike noises growls and brief wordlike sounds These protophones or predecessors to speech are gradually replaced by early words and eventually entire phrases and sentences While some newborns are inherently more talkative than others researchers have found that there are disparities in the amount of noises made by males and femalesWhile the research confirms earlier findings from a much smaller study by the same team they still come as a surprise Thats because theres a common and longheld belief that females have a reliable advantage over males in language They also have interesting implications for the evolutionary foundations of language the researchers sayFemales are believed widely to have a small but discernible advantage over males in language says Dr Kimbrough Oller of the University of Memphis Tennessee But in the first year males have proven to produce more speechlike vocalisation than femalesMale infants apparent early advantage in language development doesnt last however 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 saysOller and colleagues hadnt meant to look at sex difference at all Their primary interest is in the origins of language in infancy If theyd had to guess theyd have predicted female infants might make more sounds than males But they got the same result in an earlier paper reported in Current Biology in 2020In the new study they looked to see if they could discern the same pattern in a much larger study Oller says that the sample size in question is enormous including more than 450000 hours of allday recordings of 5899 infants using a device about the size of an iPod Those recordings were analysed automatically to count infant and adult utterances across the first 2 years of life This is the biggest sample for any study ever conducted on language development as far as we know Oller saysOverall the data showed that male infants made 10 per cent more utterances in the first year compared to females In the second year the difference switched directions with female infants making about 7 per cent more sounds than males Those differences were observed even though the number of words spoken by adults caring for those infants was higher for female infants in both years compared to malesThe researchers say it is possible male infants are more vocal early simply because they are more active in general But the data do not seem to support that given that the increased vocalisations in male infants go away by 16 months while their greater physical activity level does not But the findings might fit with an evolutionary theory that infants make so many sounds early on to express their wellness and improve their own odds of surviving Oller suggestsWhy then would male infants be more vocal than females in the first year and not later We think it may be because boys are more vulnerable to dying in the first year than girls and given that so many male deaths occur in the first year boys may have been under especially high selection pressure to produce vocal fitness signals Oller says By the second year of life as death rates drop dramatically across the board he added the pressure on special fitness signaling is lower for both boys and girlsMore study is needed to understand how caregivers react to baby sounds according to the researchersWe anticipate that caregivers will show discernible reactions of interest and of being charmed by the speechlike sounds indicators that fitness signaling by the baby elicits real feelings of fondness and willingness to invest in the wellbeing of infants who vocalize especially effectively Oller says We wonder how caregivers will react to speechlike sounds of boys and girls But they may have to be told which infants are which because we dont even know if sex can be discerned in the vocalisations aloneAlso Read High blood pressure damages healthy kidneys StudyThis story has been sourced from a third party syndicated feed agencies Midday accepts no responsibility or liability for its dependability trustworthiness reliability and data of the text Midday managementmiddaycom reserves the sole right to alter delete or remove without notice the content in its absolute discretion for any reason whatsoever