1. Objectifs

Intentions :
«This study analyzes the quantitative development of gestures, vocabulary, and grammar, and looks at the nature of the first words according to gender as well, a question that has been rarely addressed so far. » (p. 686)

Questions/Hypothèses:
The main question of this article is: « [w]hat develops in the language of French Canadian girls and boys between 8 and 30 months of age? » (p. 686)

2. Méthode

Échantillon/Matériau :
989 enfants canadiens-français âgés entre huit et trente mois

Instruments:
Questionnaire

Type de traitement des données :
Analyse statistique

3. Résumé

« The results of this study of 8- to 30-month-old francophone children in Quebec are consistent with the other findings concerning the influence of gender on language […]. More specifically, between 8 and 16 months, girls understand more sentences and produce more words than boys. Between 16 and 30 months, girls produce more words than boys, and their utterances contain more grammatical forms, and are more advanced syntactically, but gender explains only a small percentage of the variance (2–5%) for all differences noted. […] Overall, the data suggest that gender-based differences in language acquisition by French-speaking children in Quebec emerge more clearly around 17 to 18 months, an age at which the vocabulary spurt tends to begin […].These differences continue to be present up to approximately 27 months of age. Moreover, at 27 months, significant differences appear for all linguistic variables considered here (number of words produced, number of grammatical forms used, and syntactic complexity of utterances). These findings lead one to believe that at this age, a phenomenon of linguistic differentiation by gender is observed: girls have a clear advance over boys. » (p. 702)