Girls wired for communication, researchers say


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SALT LAKE CITY — Girls' talkativeness and language skills have a biological explanation, researchers say.

Researchers from the University of Maryland School of Medicine found that the preschool-aged female brain contains 30 percent more FOXP2 — a protein associated with communication — than boys of the same age.

The biological link, researchers said, could allow scientists to trace the evolutionary origin of speech.

It could also explain why girls develop language skills earlier.

For the first part of their study, J. Michael Bowers and Margaret McCarthy separated rat pups from their mother for five minutes, finding that males cried more than females. From samples, the researchers noticed the male rats had twice as much FOXP2 in their brains as the females.

When the conducted the test on humans, using the brains of children aged 4 to 5 who had died in accidents less than 24 hours prior, they found the female brain had significantly more FOXP2 than males.

"This study is one of the first to report a sex difference in the expression of a language-associated protein in humans or animals," McCarthy told the Society of Neuroscience. "The findings raise the possibility that sex differences in brain and behavior are more pervasive and established earlier than previously appreciated."

The study did not look at adult female brains, and previous studies offer conflicting information over whether or not women speak more than men.

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Celeste Tholen Rosenlof

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