| This dissertation reports the results of two experiments examining the differences between men and women in their patterns of response times on a lexical decision task in which target words were preceded either by neutral or a word prime. The first of these experiments (n = 88) replicated an earlier finding (Wolkenberg, 1996) that women, but not men, demonstrate a decrease in response time when a target word is preceded by an unrelated word prime in comparison to response time when the prime is a neutral stimulus. When the time between the initial stimulus and the target stimulus was decreased in Experiment 2 (n = 47), the same priming stimuli that had given rise to faster response times selectively elicited slower response times.; In addition to the lexical decision task, familial and individual handedness, SAT Verbal (VSAT) scores, and the results of a mental rotation task and a verbal fluency task were examined. In the longer stimulus onset asynchrony condition (SOA), VSAT scores demonstrated a reversed pattern of correlation with response time data between men and women, with slower response times on the lexical decision task correlating with higher VSAT scores in women, but the converse being true of men. Familial handedness was also found to play a role in the performance of women at the longer SOA. These data are discussed in relation to studies concerning the neuropsychology and neurological organization of hemispheric lateralization for language in general, and sex in particular. It is concluded that women have more simultaneous access to right hemisphere language functions than do men, whose access appears more sequential. It is further hypothesized that they may be somewhat more attuned to the semantic information contained in speech, while men may rely more heavily on syntactic information. |
