Gender Differences in Language Development of Korean Infants

Yoon, Hea Ryun; Kim, Young Tae

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Commun Sci Disord. 2004;9(1): 30-44.

Hea Ryun Yoon^` , and Young Tae Kim^`

윤혜련(Hea Ryun Yoon)| 김영태(Young Tae Kim)

ABSTRACT

The present study was designed to investigate the gender differences in language development of Korean infants. The SELSI was conducted to 938 infants aged 4- to 32-months who are selected in 6 different geographic regions in Korea. The SELSI is a language assessment tool which is impartial to gender difference. Data were analyzed in terms of 5 developmental stages (i. e. 4-9 months, 10-15 months, 16-21 months, 22-26 months, and 27-32 months) and the participants’ subgroups based judged by their performance (i. e. high-, middle-, and low-performance group). Results of the study indicated that gender differences started to show from 16 months of age in the expressive language, while no differences were found in the receptive language. That is, the female infants who were older than 16 months showed significantly superior expressive language skills compared to the male infants. When the data were analyzed based on the participants’ performance level, the low-performance group included more male than female infants, as has been expected. Moreover, it was noted that the low-performance male group showed more imbalance between the expressive and receptive language skills than the low-performance female group.