A Meta-Analytic Review of Gender Variations in Children’s Language Use: Talkativeness, Affiliative Speech, and Assertive Speech

Leaper & Smith (2004) conducted a meta-analysis similar to the one done in Leaper & Ayres, but concentrating on children’s talkativeness and affiliative versus assertive speech. They did not use unpublished studies and ran trimming tests, which determined that the outliers did not bias the results. A meta-analysis of 73 studies investigating talkativeness found that “girls were significantly more talkative than boys” (p. 994). Although this finding was determined to be statistically significant, “it was relatively negligible in magnitude,” meaning that the effect size was too small to be generalizable. The most important moderator was interaction partner. When the child spoke to an adult, girls were far more talkative than boys and this finding was significant both in effect size and statistically. Girls used more affiliative speech than did boys, although this finding also had a small magnitude and effect sizes were greatly increased depending on contextual factors (structured or unstructured activities, presence of video recorder, etc.). Boys were slightly more likely than girls to use assertive speech, and this effect increased depending on group size, whether the interaction took place in the home, and other contextual variables.

Leaper & Smith (2004) note that girls are more talkative at all age levels except between five and nine years, when the difference is negligible (d=.06). Both genders engaged in more assertive speech in groups while more affiliative speech was observed in dyads. Older children were more likely to use gendered speech (affiliative for girls and assertive for boys) in single-sex groups than in mixed-sex groups. Boys used more assertive speech at home than in labs. Leaper & Smith’s (2004) meta-analysis is comparable to James & Drakich’s (1993) meta-analysis in that gender as a variable cannot account for the variation in generally male (dominant or assertive) versus generally female (cooperative or affiliative) styles of speech.