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Abstract:
Male-female differences have been reported in various domains
of cognition, including memory and language. Sex differences in
language processing may in part be attributed to sex differences
between two brain memory systems on which language relies. We have
provided evidence suggesting that lexical memory is part of the
temporal-lobe-based declarative memory, whereas grammatical
computation depends upon a frontal/basal-ganglia-based procedural
memory (Ullman et al., 1997). Women may show superior performance
than men on tasks requiring declarative memory; men may show
stronger performance on tasks dependent upon procedural memory
(Halpern, 2000). Evidence from neurodegenerative disease suggests
women may rely more on lexical/declarative memory, and men on the
grammatical/procedural system, compared to the other sex (Ullman
and Yee, 1997). Here we report an ERP study of lexical-conceptual
and syntactic anomalies presented in sentence contexts to 26 men
(Newman et al., 1999) and 26 women. As expected, lexical-conceptual
anomalies yielded a centro-parietal N400 in both groups. However,
the N400 magnitude was significantly greater for women than men,
consistent with greater lexical-conceptual processing for women.
The syntactic anomalies yielded early negativities in both groups,
but with different distributions. The men showed a left-anterior
negativity (LAN), whereas the negativity was significantly less
left-lateralized and more posterior in women, suggesting at least
partially independent neural substrates for syntactic processing in
the two sexes.
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