[Gender and phoneme discrimination ability].

BACKGROUND

Boys tend to acquire language skills later than girls. Furthermore, specific language impairment and dyslexia are more often diagnosed in males than in females indicating that efficiency of phonological processing may be gender dependent. Phoneme discrimination tests tap some phonological processing abilities. Here we raised the question if phoneme discrimination abilities in male preschool children are inferior to female's phoneme discrimination abilities thus indicating less efficient phonological processing in boys.

METHODS

Participants were 161 preschool children. Phoneme discrimination was tested using minimal pair (MP) reproduction. MP were either real words or nonwords (logatoms) presented in duplets or triplets. Children were asked to repeat what they had heard (immediate serial recall task). Statistical analyses were performed using Mann-Whitney-U-tests.

RESULTS

Neither a correlation was seen between gender and phoneme discrimination sum scores (i. e. all items) nor between gender and scores of each item block.

DISCUSSION: Results indicate no difference between male and female children in regard to those phonological processes and representations being tapped by the test procedure employed here.