I have a 9month old daughter and she spends a lot of time with our friends son who is also 9mo old. He is a fantastic little boy and he is very adept at crawling/standing etc but when it comes to verbal skills... .he's got nothing on her. She is chatty, chatty, chatty. This is not an uncommon scenario. I'm not a big "gaslighter" but I'm even less of one since having a daughter. She is amazing...YOU ladies are amazing. Every guy should have a daughter. -Best thing that ever happened to me. I posted this a while back and thought it was apropos (please disregard the creepy cover art)
There certainly are intrinsic differences (to deny that is erasure of transgendered individuals; if no differences are innate, then who would feel like the "wrong" gender from early childhood, and why?) but I think it is important to consider early nurturing rather than simply writing things off as nature. Too much emphasis of nature over nurture leads to things like, "Well, my daughter is just less interested in math--the sexes are different!" when the real problem may be that the daughter has no female role models with an interest in math.
The results from this study may help explain why men and women excel at different types of tasks, said co-author and neuropsychologist Rex Jung of the University of New Mexico. For example, men tend to do better with tasks requiring more localized processing, such as mathematics, Jung said, while women are better at integrating and assimilating information from distributed gray-matter regions of the brain, which aids language skills. This in no way means women can't be as good (or better) at tasks requiring "localized" processing. It just means that our brains have evolved differently. It's fantastic. I realize that "infants understand more than they are able to vocalize". I am around two 9 month old kids every day. My daughter talks equally to both my wife and myself. I don't see her "mimicking" one more than the other. Her brain is just engineered differently than the little boys, by design. It's not better/worse, it just is. (actually.. I think it's better but I'm very biased) btw, my wife is fantastic at math and is FAR better at "localized processing" than I am. I am much better with language etc. -So anomalies do occur. source: http://www.livescience.com/3808-men-women-differently.html
I don't dispute that certain innate differences exist; however, as Pearlson cautions, it is unwise to assume that we can differentiate between the capabilities of individuals in the same way the we can predict patterns of ability in very large populations. Nor does it mean social factors don't play a role--women may be better (statistically, in very large populations) at language skills and empathy, but how many women psychologists or authors were there at a time when the employment of women in fields outside nursing or teaching was socially unacceptable? There's a relevant XKCD I'm sure you've seen -- "You're really bad at math!" vs. "Women are really bad at math!" I think you're doing a little bit of the same thing here: "My daughter proves that women are inherently more talkative!" rather than, "My daughter is very talkative! On average, when studying large populations, women are much more talkative." Not nearly as dangerous, but again I would caution you to keep Dr. Pearlson's statements in mind when generalizing about gender differences. In nearly all cases, individual differences (like your difference from your wife) will be greater than the difference between the averages of large populations. It is unlikely that any individual's abilities in any area can be meaningfully judged based on studies dealing with an average of thousands or millions who happen to share their gender. Source: http://www.cerebromente.org.br/n11/mente/eisntein/cerebro-ho...