Most children make adorable slip-ups in grammar when they’re learning to speak. Now scientists say the mistakes could vary by gender. Boys and girls tend to use different parts of their brain to learn some fundamental parts of grammar, according to a new study. ‘Sex has been virtually ignored in studies of the learning, representation, processing and neural bases of language,’ said lead author Michael Ullman, a neuroscientist at Georgetown University. ‘This study shows that differences between males and females may be an important factor in these cognitive processes.’ For the study, published in Developmental Science, researchers investigated the different brain systems that children used when they made mistakes like ‘Yesterday I holded the bunny.’ They found that girls tended to use a process that dealt with memorizing words and associations between them, whereas boys used a process governing the rules of language. Research has shown that women tend to be better at tasks that employ what is called declarative memory, such as memorizing word lists. They use what is called a ‘mental lexicon’ to memorize and remember words. Procedural memory, controlled by a different part of the brain, is used to […]