Gender differences in non-adjacent dependency learning

Theories about the advantage for girls in language development are well known, but not always sufficiently backed up by empirical evidence. The purpose of this study is to determine whether there is a difference between the learning and language abilities of boys and girls at a young age, focusing on pattern learning and the generalization of these word patterns. This study investigated whether 18-month-old infants are able to generalize non-adjacent dependency patterns to novel contexts, and whether we can identify gender differences in the performance on this task. The looking behavior of 21 infants was measured in an Artificial Grammar Learning experiment using the Headturn Preference Procedure. The Dutch version of the MacArthurBates Communicative Development Inventory (N-CDI) was used to assess children’s productive and receptive vocabulary. In contrast to the predictions there were no significant differences between the N-CDI scores of boys and girls. In the Artificial Grammar Learning experiment, infants were overall not able to distinguish correct from incorrect dependencies, but we did find a significant effect of gender on the ability to discriminate correct from incorrect dependencies when looking only at the first four trials. Although the N-CDI data does not support a gender distinction, the behavioral data suggest an advantage for girls in distributional learning, which collaborates with the theory that girls have an overall advantage in language development. Introduction Although interest in differences between male and female humans has existed for centuries, in the last few years there has been a proliferation in scientific studies investigating gender differences. Questionnaires and other standard research methods are still in use, but there are now also new research techniques that make it possible to investigate subtle differences between the male and female brain, cognition and behavior. An example is the use of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), which led to an increasing amount of studies investigating these gender differences in different tasks at different ages (Kaiser, Haller, Schmitz & Nitsch, 2009). The language development of boys and girls is an interesting subject and generally known to be different between the two sexes. However, there are a lot of contradictions in the outcomes of several studies that investigated gender differences in language development. The ages of the participants and varied methods used in these studies, made it difficult to compare the results (Andreano & Cahill, 2009) and to make clear statements about the existence of gender differences in language acquisition. This study focuses on one specific skill that might play a role in grammar learning, which is non-adjacent dependency learning. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether there are differences between the performance of 18-month-old boys and girls in the ability to learn non-adjacent dependencies and generalize them to novel contexts. One of the studies that provided evidence for the existence of gender differences in language development, was done by Kramer, Kaplan, Delis, O’Donnell and Prifitera (1997). This study used questionnaires and a word-recall task with 811 children between the ages of five and sixteen years old that were tested. The Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence was the questionnaire used for 5-year-old children and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised was used for children aged six to sixteen. They were all administered the California Verbal Learning TestChildren’s Version, which contains various trials of 15-word lists with words that were semantically categorized and which they had to recall in various ways and orders afterwards. The results of this large study showed that girls performed better than boys on all of the immediate and Gender differences in non-adjacent dependency learning