Department of Biological and Medical Psychology, University of Bergen.
Department of Neuropsychology and Psychopharmacology, Maastricht University.
Perspect Psychol Sci. 2023 Jan;18(1):67-90. doi: 10.1177/17456916221082116. Epub 2022 Jul 22.
Women are thought to fare better in verbal abilities, especially in verbal-fluency and verbal-memory tasks. However, the last meta-analysis on sex/gender differences in verbal fluency dates from 1988. Although verbal memory has only recently been investigated meta-analytically, a comprehensive meta-analysis is lacking that focuses on verbal memory as it is typically assessed, for example, in neuropsychological settings. On the basis of 496 effect sizes and 355,173 participants, in the current meta-analysis, we found that women/girls outperformed men/boys in phonemic fluency (s = 0.12-0.13) but not in semantic fluency (s = 0.01-0.02), for which the sex/gender difference appeared to be category-dependent. Women/girls also outperformed men/boys in recall ( = 0.28) and recognition (s = 0.12-0.17). Although effect sizes are small, the female advantage was relatively stable over the past 50 years and across lifetime. Published articles reported stronger female advantages than unpublished studies, and first authors reported better performance for members of their own sex/gender. We conclude that a small female advantage in phonemic fluency, recall, and recognition exists and is partly subject to publication bias. Considerable variance suggests further contributing factors, such as participants' language and country/region.
女性被认为在言语能力方面表现更好，尤其是在言语流畅性和言语记忆任务方面。然而，关于性别差异在言语流畅性方面的最后一次荟萃分析可以追溯到 1988 年。尽管最近才对言语记忆进行了荟萃分析，但缺乏对言语记忆的全面分析，而这种分析通常是在神经心理学环境中进行的。基于 496 个效应量和 355173 名参与者，在当前的荟萃分析中，我们发现女性在语音流畅性方面（s = 0.12-0.13）优于男性，但在语义流畅性方面（s = 0.01-0.02）并不优于男性，并且性别差异似乎取决于类别。女性在回忆（s = 0.28）和识别（s = 0.12-0.17）方面也优于男性。虽然效应量很小，但女性优势在过去 50 年和整个生命周期中相对稳定。已发表的文章报告了比未发表的研究更强的女性优势，并且第一作者报告了他们自己性别的成员表现更好。我们的结论是，女性在语音流畅性、回忆和识别方面存在较小的优势，并且部分受到发表偏倚的影响。相当大的差异表明存在进一步的影响因素，例如参与者的语言和所在的国家/地区。
