لخّصلي

intuitively, gender differences affect in second language acquisition. After all, the commonly-held folk wisdom that girls language are better than boys still exists. Yet research finding are conclusive regarding female advantage in foreign language learning in general (e.g. Brantmeier, Schueller, Wilde & Kinginger, 2007) and pronunciation learning in particular (e.g. Elliot, 1995; Purcell & Suter, 1980). It should be noted, however, that very few studies solely focus on gender and pronunciation. Instead, gender is often combined with other variables such as atti- tude, motivation, age or exposure. Empirical studies in this field dating back to the late twentieth century (e.g. Elliot, 1995; Purcell & Suter, 1980) did not identify gender as a reliable predictor of degree of L2 foreign accent, whereas more recent investigations have (e.g. Dogil & Reiterer, 2009; Khamkhien, 2010). Jahandar, Hodabandehlou, Seyedi & Mousavi Dolat Abadi (2012), for example, point out that although female students often out- perform their male colleagues in producing accurate consonants (but not vowels), this does not give rise to assume complete superiority of female over male subjects. In another experiment carried out in Germany on L2 pronunciation talent, Reiterer et al. (2011) noticed a significant gender difference in one of their tasks, namely the imitation of Hindi sounds, where the scores for the male imitators were higher. They speculate that the reason for this may lie in the task type requiring a speech imitation skill which was devoid of syntactic and semantic operations. Apparently, when it comes to motor skill learning, recent evidence (Dorfberger, Adi-Japha, & Karni, 2009) shows that male learners have a major advantage over their female counterparts. Giftedness research in general suggests that gender dif- ferences are greater in talented than in average ability individuals (Preckel, Goetz, Pekrun & Kleine, 2008). They attribute this to the fact that evolutionary theories predominately consider males as more located in the extremes of the normal distri- bution curve, whereas females tend to be more represented towards the mean (with respect to any kind of ability).

intuitively, gender differences affect in second language acquisition. After all, the commonly-held folk wisdom that girls language are better than boys still exists. Yet research finding are conclusive regarding female advantage in foreign language learning in general (e.g. Brantmeier, Schueller, Wilde & Kinginger, 2007) and pronunciation learning in particular (e.g. Elliot, 1995; Purcell & Suter, 1980). It should be noted, however, that very few studies solely focus on gender and pronunciation. Instead, gender is often combined with other variables such as atti- tude, motivation, age or exposure. Empirical studies in this field dating back to the late twentieth century (e.g. Elliot, 1995; Purcell & Suter, 1980) did not identify gender as a reliable predictor of degree of L2 foreign accent, whereas more recent investigations have (e.g. Dogil & Reiterer, 2009; Khamkhien, 2010). Jahandar, Hodabandehlou, Seyedi & Mousavi Dolat Abadi (2012), for example, point out that although female students often out- perform their male colleagues in producing accurate consonants (but not vowels), this does not give rise to assume complete superiority of female over male subjects. In another experiment carried out in Germany on L2 pronunciation talent, Reiterer et al. (2011) noticed a significant gender difference in one of their tasks, namely the imitation of Hindi sounds, where the scores for the male imitators were higher. They speculate that the reason for this may lie in the task type requiring a speech imitation skill which was devoid of syntactic and semantic operations. Apparently, when it comes to motor skill learning, recent evidence (Dorfberger, Adi-Japha, & Karni, 2009) shows that male learners have a major advantage over their female counterparts. Giftedness research in general suggests that gender dif- ferences are greater in talented than in average ability individuals (Preckel, Goetz, Pekrun & Kleine, 2008). They attribute this to the fact that evolutionary theories predominately consider males as more located in the extremes of the normal distri- bution curve, whereas females tend to be more represented towards the mean (with respect to any kind of ability).