Abstract :
The purpose of this article is to examine the language of girls and boys between 8 and 30 months of
age, using the Quebec French version of The MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories.
The findings from this parental report measure confirm those of earlier research, which showed the
linguistic superiority of girls over boys at a young age. More specifically, the results show that girls
produce significantly more words than boys; their utterances contain a greater number of grammatical
forms, and are more complex syntactically. On the qualitative level, the data illustrate distinctive
characteristics associated with gender in the acquisition of the first 100 words. These findings suggest
that caution is necessary when assessing young children to interpret performance in light of factors
that may contribute to it, including gender. These results are discussed in light of whether separate
normative data are warranted for young boys and girls learning Canadian French.
