Discuss the gender differences in verbal ability among adolescents.
What will be an ideal response?
Answers will vary. Verbal abilities include reading, spelling, grammar, oral comprehension, and word fluency. As a group, females surpass males in verbal ability throughout their lives. These differences show up early. Girls seem to acquire language faster than boys. They make more prelinguistic vocalizations, utter their first word sooner, and develop larger vocabularies. Boys in the United States are more likely than girls to have reading problems. Why do females excel in verbal abilities? Biological factors such as the organization of the brain may play a role, but do not discount cultural factors-whether a culture stamps a skill as gender-neutral, masculine, or feminine. In Nigeria and England, reading is looked on as a masculine activity, and boys traditionally surpass girls in reading ability. But in the United States and Canada, reading tends to be stereotyped as feminine, and girls tend to excel.
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