Girl Talk: are women really better at language?

3 Quarks Daily (what is a quark?) is one of those blogs which sorts out the interesting, quirky and occasionally bizarre stuff from a range of "quality" media, produces a short summary and then links to the original source.

So I wrote and then thought: "There must be a better way to describe this". There is. I found it on the Typepad blog (not a place I normally go but hey ...)

3 Quarks Daily is primarily a filter blog -- one that captures interesting flotsam and jetsam from around the web and re-publishes excerpts, commentary, and links to the original. But on Mondays 3 Quarks Daily is something very different. The group behind the filter -- an erudite cadre of scientists, artists, and philosophers -- each take their turn penning regular columns on any subject they choose or, in some cases, regular subjects such as politics, poetry, and art. The site's title is a reference to the sub-atomic particles that emerged from a turn of phrase by literary legend James Joyce, and the blog itself hopes to span the breadth of culture -- from science to literature, from politics to philosophy. Judging by the success of this blog at drawing readers and contributors of keen intellect, they're found a winning formula.

Blurb over -- here's the story from 3quarksdaily by Azra Raza

From Scientific American:

Scientific literature has been littered with studies over the past 40 years documenting the superior language skill of girls, but the biologic reason why has remained a mystery until now. Researchers report in the journal Neuropsychologia that the answer lies in the way words are processed: girls completing a linguistic abilities task showed greater activity in brain areas implicated specifically in language encoding, which decipher information abstractly. Boys, on the other hand, showed a lot of activity in regions tied to visual and auditory functions, depending on the way the words were presented during the exercise.The finding suggests that although linguistic information goes directly to the seat of language processing in the female brain, males use sensory machinery to do a great deal of the work in untangling the data. In a classroom setting, it implies that boys need to be taught language both visually (with a textbook) and orally (through a lecture) to get a full grasp of the subject, whereas a girl may be able to pick up the concepts by either method.
More here.

Stunning -- and explains a lot.