One of the most perplexing things that people can ever attempt to understand is the way the opposite sex communicates. That is precisely the research topic of Dr. Douglas D. Burman, research associate in Northwestern’s Roxelyn and Richard Pepper Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders. His findings: gender differences in language appear to be biologically based.

Burman and co. made use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain activity in 31 boys and 31 girls within the 9-15 age range while the children performed spelling and writing tasks.

After having statistically accounted for individual differences, Dr. Burman and his colleague arrived at the following conclusion:  the regions of the brains that boys and girls rely on when processing and communicating are different. Thus, boys appear to be more sensory in their approach, while girls appear to be more abstract. Furthermore, the researchers found a greater level of activation in the language areas of the girls' brains than the boys.'

Dr. Burman offered one possible explanation:

One possibility is that boys have some kind of bottleneck in their sensory processes that can hold up visual or auditory information and keep it from being fed into the language areas of the brain.