Sex Differences in the Use of Delayed Semantic Context When Listening to Disrupted Speech

Female as opposed to male listeners were better able to use a delayed informative cue at the end of a long sentence to report an earlier word which was disrupted by noise. Informative (semantically related) or uninformative (semantically unrelated) word cues were presented 2, 6, or 10 words after a target word whose initial phoneme had been replaced with noise. A total of 84 young adults (45 males) listened to each sentence and then repeated it after its offset. The semantic benefit effect (SBE) was the difference in the accuracy of report of the disrupted target word during informative vs. uninformative sentences. Women had significantly higher SBEs than men even though there were no significant sex differences in terms of number of non-target words reported, the effect of distance between the disrupted target word and the informative cue, or kinds of errors generated. We suggest that the superior ability of women to use delayed semantic information to decode an earlier ambiguous speech signal may be linked to women’s tendency to engage the hemispheres more bilaterally than men during word processing. Since the maintenance of semantic context under ambiguous conditions demands more right than left hemispheric resources, this may give women an advantage.