Sex Differences in Neurophysiological Activation Patterns During Phonological Input Processing: An Influencing Factor for Normative Data

Abstract

In the context of neurophysiological normative data, it has been established that aging has a significant impact on neurophysiological correlates of auditory phonological input processes, such as phoneme discrimination (PD) and word recognition (WR). Besides age, sex is another demographic factor that influences several language processes. We aimed to disentangle whether sex has a similar effect on PD and WR. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded in 20 men and 24 women. During PD, three phonemic contrasts (place and manner of articulation and voicing) were compared using the attentive P300 and pre-attentive Mismatch Negativity. To investigate WR, real words were contrasted with pseudowords in a pre-attentive oddball task. Women demonstrated a larger sensitivity to spectrotemporal differences, as evidenced by larger P300 responses to the place of articulation (PoA) contrast and larger P300 and MMN responses than men in PoA-based PD. Men did not display such sensitivity. Attention played an important role, considering that women needed more attentional resources to differentiate between PoA and the other phonemic contrasts. During WR, pseudowords evoked larger amplitudes already 100 ms post-stimulus independent of sex. However, women had decreased P200 latencies, but longer N400 latencies in response to pseudowords, whereas men showed increased N400 latencies compared to women in response to real words. The current results demonstrate significant sex-related influences on phonological input processes. Therefore, existing neurophysiological normative data for age should be complemented for the factor sex.

Auditory Evoked Potential Mismatch Negativity in Normal-Hearing Adults

“…Some studies 27 32 33 demonstrated neurophysiological differences between gender, particularly for verbal abilities in favor of women. Research 27 32 33 indicates that, in general, the amplitude of MMN is greater in women than in men, whereas the latency is greater in men.…”

“…Research 27 32 33 indicates that, in general, the amplitude of MMN is greater in women than in men, whereas the latency is greater in men. Nevertheless, these differences occur only for stimuli with phonemics contrasts.…”

Verbal and Nonverbal Mismatch Negativity in Children with Typical Development: Variables Analysis

“… 8 The study points to amplitude of MMN tending to be higher among females in relation to males when verbal stimuli are used; however, this does not occur with latency, which presents higher values for males. 31 The authors believe that higher amplitudes among females may be related to a higher bundling of enveloped neurons, as well as to the better synchrony of the neural network. Nevertheless, such findings were not evidenced in the present study.…”

Sex-specific association between emotion negativity and neural processing of reward feedback in young children

“…In fact, the P200 has been reported to be consistently associated with greater arousal levels (Carretié et al, 2001; Schutter, de Haan, & van Honk, 2004) and attention capturing by target stimuli (Potts, 2004; Potts, Martin, Burton, & Montague, 2006), supporting the idea that neural processes supporting attention facilitation to salient stimuli may be represented by the P200 (see (Kotz & Paulmann, 2011) for a review). Interestingly, along with several behavioral and ERP studies reporting sex differences in attention allocation during processing of emotional stimuli in adults (Kraines, Kelberer, & Wells, 2017; Pfabigan, Lamplmayr-Kragl, Pintzinger, Sailer, & Tran, 2014; Stoet, 2017; van Hooff, Crawford, & van Vugt, 2011), emerging evidence indicates sex differences in the P200 ERP components during several cognitive processes (e.g., (Aerts, van Mierlo, Hartsuiker, Santens, & De Letter, 2015), with males having a larger fronto-central P200 peak amplitude and a shorter P200 latency period compared to females (Bourisly & Shuaib, 2018).…”