Sex Difference, Word Fluency And Stroop Task

In the study of language and foreign language education, sex difference has been an important issue in theory and practice.This research tries to find out by psychological experiments whether there is real sex difference among foreign language learners in language learning and using. Sex difference is narrowed down to difference of male and female students in word fluency. Speech fluency is one of the aspects to measure language proficiency. Limited by time and experiment condition, the experiment of this research is narrowed down to the output word fluency. Foreign language learners in this thesis refer to Chinese students in Sichuan University who learn English as a foreign language.According to the previous researches, overall differences in the performance of females and males on intelligence tests are not found. But there are sex differences on several aspects reported. Anyhow the findings concerning sex differences are conflicting. The question whether there is a real difference between sexes in language has not been satisfactorily answered yet. Stroop Effect is originally a psychological research method on interference. From 1935 when John Ridley Stroop firstly reported it until now, a large amount of researches have been done on this effect or by this effect. Psychologists did researches on human brain with this effect. Linguists, especially psycholinguists,...