Dear Charlotte Allen:

Please get a subscription to Scientific American immediately.

Thanks.

Abby

And both should start learning a second language earlier.

Oy! i was the only guy in my school who was interested in languages and my french teacher said most of the students in linguistics classes were girls. This did not help the fag jokes at all :)

You're confusing me now, what? Weren't all the wimmens stupid a few posts back? Damn you, real science!

Hm... did anyone see the NYT magazine cover story about single-sex education? Talk of this is in the air.

@nodoubt9203: But I am sure it helped out with the ladies later, right? Nothing is hotter than a man speaking another language. We fall for that crap every time.

Haven't we ALWAYS known this? For fuck's sake.

@nodoubt9203: Or the mens, for that matter. I can't believe I ignored that. My gehs LOVE the foreign-speak.

So basically, when I mock my boyfriend by saying things like, "What, do I need to draw you a picture!??" That IS actually what I need to do for him to understand. wow??? This is good info.

@WaltzingMatilda: it would've helped if i were straight ha!

@WaltzingMatilda: yes yes exactamundo.

@nodoubt9203: Ha! Ya see - I am a slow one, but, eh, sometimes I can pick up the pieces. :)

@AbbyNormal: Exactly what I was thinking!

@Skinny Bone Jones: Always known what, though, exactly? Not to nerd out on you, or anything, but what's fascinating about this is that girl-brains are (apparently) processing words as independent abstractions, and boy-brains are (apparently) processing them as visual or auditory units. It's not really possible to say what that means in terms of language skills, but it could lead you down a really awesome rabbit hole if you started thinking about the philosophy of language -- pair this up with reading Wittgenstein and you'll wind up sounding like a stoner in about 10 seconds.

After the infuriating conversation I just had with my husband, I'm doubting men have any language skills. How do I draw him a picture over the phone that says "Stop being so miserable! Your life is not that bad!" Maybe a picture of someone pissing in his cornflakes with a big red X over it?

@EmilyAnn: I think Jezebel covered the single-sex education story already.

I don't think single sex education should be pursued with the backing of researh like this. While it may be true that girls excel at oral learning (no pun intended), all children benefit from both oral and visual lessons, not just one or the other.

@JessiRamsey: Amen, sister.

@JessiRamsey: It's all about the dual-immersion.

@ceejeemcbeegee: I have always been incredibly jealous of my friends who were put in Spanish immersion.

@blondegrlz: Mine has been this way lately too. Buck up, dudes.

How cute is that photo of the two girls laughing? Stupid old boys! ( I kid, I kid)

@Archetype: my house has free spanish immersion 24/7 ;)

@Archetype: Donde este el boner?

@briardahl: Hmm, could this be why women tend to use more words when communicating than men, as each word they are communicating is being expressed as its own independent abstraction complete with own meaning, wheareas men see speech and communication as expressing one idea/endpoint/etc. and so the more succinct the better?

@briardahl: I can appreciate this the way I once appreciated the minutiae of my Neuroscience friend's pretty, pretty brain scans and studies (no really, she'd email them and I'd print them out and devour them), etc. but I meant more the fact that it's generally been understood that female human beings have an edge on males with regard to language.

Which, of course, you must always take with a grain of salt, because stupid, inarticulate beasts of both genders exist the world over. Sadly.

@gunshy007: they are adorable.

Mai langwagg skillz, let me show u dem.

@nodoubt9203: You're lucky. Some of my Latin friends were in the immersion program as well (obviously). Alas, I spent my formative years in a small town with a crap school system. Trying to learn a new language in your 20's is frustrating.

@andBegorrah: i insist that be used on a future edition of LOL Vogue.

@Archetype: yeah i'm thankful my parents insisted on speaking only spanish to me and teaching me to read and write in both.

@MissSmithDrankYourVodka: Oh, geez, I wouldn't even guess at that sort of thing -- I always worry about how easy it is to take small findings from popular-science articles and start devising theories for why people act the way they do. I mean, I'm not even sure how to generalize about how men and women do and don't use language. Shining example: as far as being succinct goes, I and plenty of the guys I know are total long-winded blowhards, as exhibited in this post. Who knows?

@Skinny Bone Jones: Ah, I see what you mean now. I just get stonerish and detail-obsessed when it comes to language stuff, cause it's a universe of complicated. Even just asking what it means to be skilled with language brings up all sorts of awesome questions about what language is for and what it means to be "better" at it.

I wish people wouldn't take "scientific articles" as seriously as they do. Next week they're going to come out with another study debunking this one. That's how this shit normally works.

@MissSmithDrankYourVodka: But they'll still never be able to parallel park.

@briardahl: yeah i get detailed about what "knowing a language" means, some people think i know a language cause i throw out a few phrases and words at them in the language.

Like, duh.

So it's just de Saussure's signifier/signified in action, as represented by girls versus boys.

I'd be more convinced if this were a multi-continent study. If females in Asia, Africa, Europe, North and South America all seemed to process language the same way, I'd say something biological is going on.

As it is, I find studies that "prove" mental abilities based on gender that are conducted only in one country/culture highly suspect. Like when we're told that women "naturally" have lower math skills or can't read maps, I wonder if that's true the world over, or if women in the U.S. just aren't raised to learn or value those skills.

@Dauphine: But the funny part is that taking it as a signifier/signified thing would actually go AGAINST a lot of notions of the sexes that people here would be similarly "no duh" about, right?

P.S. I'd note to everyone else that the study is about girls and boys, not men and women -- not at all safe to jump to the conclusion that the same thing is happening once brains have matured.

So women are better with words than men... just imagine if Pynchon or Joyce had breasts! They'd be the most cunning linguists ever!

Seriously, though... hope the point of the article was to be a general survey of how children's brains work, and not some quantitative judgement about one gender having an edge over the other. Differences aren't a negative, they're just differences.

@EmilyAnn: I saw that article in the NYT, but haven't read. As someone generally in favor of single-sex education for moderate stretches, is it worth reading?

@MissSmithDrankYourVodka: i don't think there's any actual evidence that women use more words than men:
[www.sciam.com]

@Gumbina80:
it's not true, in many other nations, boys and girls are at the same level (standardized test-wise) for reading and math.

my theory (personally) is that we're taught that girls are bad at math and good at language (and vice versa) and subconsciously (or consciously) give up at an early age.

The superior language skills come from the fact that a woman's colliculus is larger than a man's. It's a major neurological difference between men and women.

Oh, and the heritability data on language aptitude does show that very little of it is related to environmental factors. So it has nothing to do with environment, nor sexist expectations causing a self-fullfilling prophecy.

Oh, and psychological experiments which scan areas are often rife with errors, and rarely are able to reduce the effects of confounding variables. Personally I'm not sure why they were even bothering to test a phenomena that's already been well-explained. Or how they managed to secure funding for that matter.

@Evil-Jeremy: so i have a femenine brain?

@Dauphine: i don't understand a word you just said.

@MissSmithDrankYourVodka: Is THAT why I spend a fucktacular amount of time parsing each and every email I get from my supervisors, professors, family, friends, hOt4utooViaGRAArusianGrls@hotmail.com, etc.??

This is seriously old news. When I was in 9th grade (eons ago), we did a combined IQ, aptitude test where I scored in the 99th percentile for languages compared to boys, but only the 50th percentile compared to girls. However, I scored in the 99th percentile for spacial relations for both - very unusual for girls... I have a boy brain, apparently. Does that explain why I'm a commitmentphobe?

@Evil-Jeremy: Could you point me toward more information on this colliculus / language-processing thing? You sound like you know exactly what you're talking about, and yet everything I'm seeing tells me the colliculus is only tangentially involved in language processing and sizes vary only slightly.

@Evil-Jeremy: I am also curious how they got funding for this study, since this has been pretty well-researched and well-documented as far as I know. This is almost introductory info in a cog sci class.

That said, differences are just... differences. This doesn't really say much about "intelligence", whatever that is.

Not surprised. The Canadian Press recently released a story about immigrants not learning English and referred to a Canadian born Grade 2 boy who is in an ESL program.

[www.thestar.com]

@PetiteGal: my mom came to the US pretty young but didn't learn english until she was 16 and she speaks AMAZINGLY whilst some guys that came here when they were 10 do not speak english as well. I think the difference is more her personality than her cognitive abilites (she is way smart).

@ PetiteGal: Unfortunately, that's not uncommon at all, for girls or boys. I teach middle school, and a ton of U.S.-born kids are still in the ESL program at ages 12-14. Some are special ed or just slow processors; others have skated by with limited English for many years because outside of class, they never, ever have to use English.

As a language teacher, I do notice that my preteen girls *tend* to learn language more easily than the boys. Such as with any statistic, though, there are many, many exceptions to the rule.

Boys like oral. Big surprise.

@MissSmithDrankYourVodka: Hmm maybe they are adorable now but they are gonna be drunk sluts in a few years.
@gunshy007:They might be cute now but wait a few years and they will be drug addict whores.

Girls definitely have better oral skills than boys. I know this cause if you watch gay porn, the men don't suck dick as well as the women do in hetero porn which is fustrating as I only want to see men do it.

@Evil-Jeremy: @briardahl: I think Jeremy may have been referring to the corpus callosum, the brain structure that "connects" the two hemispheres, which is often purported to be proportionally larger in women than in men (though recently studies may have shown this not to be true). The colliculi are part of the midbrain, and thus aren't involved in higher-level speech processing (but are necessary to some auditory processing).

From the study, it appears that the brain structures which link the language-processing parts of the brain (the inferior frontal cortex and certain gryi of the temporal lobe) are more active in girls when presented with the verbal stimuli used in the study regardless of whether the verbal stimuli was auditory or visual. In boys, apparently the modality of the stimuli impacted the level of activation of the same brain structures. Not only was the activation level different, but apparentl