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Lauren Hollier's success in UWA's Three Minute Thesis competition might just have something to do with her gender.

Her research in the School of Psychology on the difference in language development between boys and girls asks if testosterone is the key.

So the PhD student's winning way with language may have started when she was a toddler, with less testosterone but a bigger vocabulary than little boys of the same age.

Lauren is in the third year of a combined Clinical Masters and PhD in Psychology and is supervised by Associate Professor Andrew Whitehouse and Professor Murray Mayberry.

"I didn't tell either of them that I was entering the competition until about a week before the presentations," she said. "Then they were both too busy to come!"

Lauren's PhD research subject is F etal Testosterone Exposure and Language Development: Is Atypical Cerebral Lateralisation the Linking Mechanism? This was simplified in the 3MT to Boys, Girls and Language: Is Testosterone the Key?

Here is a slightly edited version of her winning presentation:

"Have you ever seen young children playing? You'll often see girls, say about two years old, who have their dolls and toys spread out around them, having a tea party. And you might hear them saying things like: ‘Would dolly like some more tea?' ‘Would teddy like a bit more cake?' You might see boys of the same age playing with cars, and they might be saying something like ‘vroom vroom.'

"What could be causing this difference? Why is it that young girls seem to have a better vocabulary than boys of the same age?

"One suggestion is how much testosterone these children are exposed to in the womb. We know that boys are exposed to much higher levels of testosterone prenatally than girls are. And this may be what's underlying the difference in the rate of language development.

"So we looked at this using blood taken from the umbilical cord at birth to measure testosterone, and compared it to a vocabulary measure, which was taken when the children were two years old.

"We found that higher levels of testosterone did indeed predict a smaller vocabulary at age two in boys. So this tells us that higher levels of testosterone may be having a negative impact on the rate of language development.

"The next step is how does testosterone actually affect language development? One theory is what's called cerebral lateralisation, essentially, asymmetry of the brain. Most people use predominantly the left side of their brains while processing language. And it's been suggested that atypical cerebral lateralisation (using both sides of your brain equally or using more of the right side) while processing language may underlie delayed language development or even language impairment.

"My aim is to look at this using a neuroimaging technique to determine what side of the brain people use during a language task. I will be doing this with 23-year-olds whose umbilical cord blood was collected at birth. This allows me to directly compare the relationship between early hormone exposure and subsequent brain development. If it is found that higher testosterone is related to atypical lateralisation it will take us one step closer to understanding why girls develop language faster than boys."

Lauren won $3,000 to further her research and will represent UWA in the Trans-Tasman Three Minute Thesis finals at the University of Queensland on 11 October.

"I don't want to change my presentation much, but I'm happy to take advice on how I can get some references to autism (which is part of my research) into it. It was so hard to get it down to three minutes and that was one thing that I reluctantly left out," she said.

Published in UWA News , 20 August 2012