Neurolinguistic Differences in Language Processing Between the Sexes

The method of visual Event Related Potentials (ERPs) was used to investigate the participation of the left and right occipital and temporal lobes of males and females in performing rhyme and semantic tasks. 60 Greek students, 30 males and 30 females, participated, who were all right handed and native speakers of the Greek language. In both tasks, females seemed to implicate both cerebral hemispheres thus showing a weaker pattern of lateralization than males. In addition, females were proved better than males in performing both tasks, since they showed a statistically significant superiority, when compared to males, in the mean latencies of all the components of left and right occipital and temporal lobes. Our findings imply that although the left cerebral hemisphere (LH) is believed to be dominant for language, the right cerebral hemisphere (RH) is also involved in certain components of language processing.