Do girls and women have a general superiority in verbal abilities ?

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 Women do not have a general superiority of verbal abilities  -even though this is a very common myth.  In fact,  on most tests of verbal function,  there exists no sex difference.  In other words,  women's verbal superiority is undetectable in real life.  It is only in certain very specific aspects of the language function that women are slightly superior.  For example,   women seem to do better than men on certain tasks of verbal fluency.  If you ask a person to state out loud as many words as possible within 4 minutes that start with the letter "s",   women will typically slightly outperform men.  However,  if you show pictures to people and ask them to name out loud what those pictures represent, without any time constraint, men do slightly better (non-significantly) than women.   Both these tasks have to do with our knowledge of words.   It is only in the way our memory store of words is accessed that very specific and artificial sex differences emerge.  One of the verbal skills which has been documented on a huge scale is performance on the verbal scale of the American scholastic aptitude tests (SATs).   Curiously, in 1967 there was a slight female advantage,  but by 1990,  males were superior and even more so than the females had been in 1967.   It is well known that men do better than women on analogical reasoning in the verbal domain.   It remains very difficult to link such sex differences to putative brain differences.  And switch-overs from one generation to the next certainly don't help support biological theorizing about such putative sex differences.   There is simply no reasonable simple neurodynamic explanation that comes to mind,  not to mine anyway.