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From: Nan Ratner
Date: 14 Oct 2006
Time: 21:24:10 -0500
Remote Name: 172.137.120.233
The simplest answer is that this gender inbalance is seen for other communication (speech-language) disorders (Specific Language Impairment, dyslexia), and may reflect male disadvantage with language tasks during early childhood (most of your language tests have separate norms for boys and girls to reflect this). In addition, the gender inbalance is somewhat lessened if you collect data close to onset as Yairi and colleagues have: it appears that girls' stronger language skills may enable them to recover more often than boys do. And please, I do not want to get into Larry Summers-type discussions about gender and innate ability. I am just reporting the available facts relevant to early childhood pacing of skills. Nan