Reply to comment

I work with children under 2 years old, and I study linguistics (I've just started, so I'm only claiming interest at this point, not expertise). We use sign language to aid communication and language acquisition. (It's all the rage these days, the idea being that babies can understand before they can physically speak.) Typically it is thought that girls acquire language faster than boys, but I've noticed that the boys have just as large--if not larger--vocabularies than the girls. There are a couple of differences, however. For one thing, the boys still lag behind in actually speaking their words--the signs are all they can do. For another thing, they seem to do quite well with naming, but they are not as good at communicating (e.g., they can recognize several animals, but they won't ask for a drink). This is just anecdotal, I know, but I was curious to see if any language studies you know of have also run into this.