Gender differences in verbal ability: a meta-analysis.

Hyde & Linn (1988) set out to examine an adage in psychology that has been oft-repeated and seldom examined: that girls have better verbal abilities than boys. Their study included dissertations and unpublished studies, which are accessible via ERIC; all told, they examined 165 studies. The authors identified five different skills that might be measured in tests of verbal ability: definition retrieval, retrieval of names from a picture stimulus, creating relations between words, filtering for relevant information, and measures of verbal production. Unfortunately, Hyde & Linn (1988) did not report running tests without statistical outliers, instead simply excluding one study based on, apparently, their own judgment. They conclude, “that there are no gender differences in verbal ability, at least at this time, in American culture, in the standard ways that verbal ability has been measured” (p. 62). The verbal production subtests indicated that females performed better on tests that measure quality of production, but that males produced more in terms of “total talking time” (p. 64).