Sexual Brain Differences in How Speech Is Processed

Let's face it: men come from Mars, women from Venus. Women hear from a conversation just words like shopping, money, jewel, gold, diamond, spending, and so on. Men hear just sex, football, boobs, a**, beer, chicks and so on. A new study published in "Neuropsychologia" comes with another element to the overwhelming difference in brain structure between the sexes: teen males and females employ somewhat different brain areas when processing speech.

It's no secret that girls get higher marks than boys in most language tests, assessing verbal fluency and word memory. The team made by cognitive scientists Douglas Burman and James Booth, at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, has investigated what brain differences are responsible for these sex differences.

The team put 50 subjects, aged 9 to 15, half girls, half boys, to make several word tests. Paired words were either flashed on a screen or spoken, and the volunteers had to say, for example, which of them rhymed. Their brain activity while accomplishing the tasks were watched using functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Girls displayed a much higher activation of the cerebral language nuclei than boys. The brains of the boys presented a higher activation in the sensory brain nuclei (visual or auditory) at the moment of accomplishing the task.

Thus, the team has found that girls use more the language-processing brain nuclei, no matter how they get the information, but boys use the information connected to the sensory input. Still, the researchers cannot say which of these differences are also found in adulthood.

"It might just reflect the fact that males take longer to mature than females. But the findings could have implications for education--suggesting, for example, that separating the sexes in middle school may not be a bad idea," said Burman.
"This paper is part of a growing awareness that not all brains work the same way," said brain imager Richard Haier of the University of California, Irvine.