ABSTRACT
Objective: To study the gender differences in ERPs recorded during a recognition task for Chinese words. Methods: 15 male and 15 female healthy volunteers received a Chinese words recognition task and the EEG signals were recorded from 20 scalp sites simultaneously. The stimuli were meaningful words consisting of two Chinese characters. Results: Both men and females showed a positive-going parietal old/new effect, but females demonstrated larger P500 amplitudes and shorter P500 latency than males. Furthermore, the parietal old/new effect of males was significantly left-lateralized, while that of females showed more bilateral pattern. Only males elicited obvious frontally distributed old/new effect between 250 and 350 ms, which was negative-going and right-lateralized. Conclusion: Gender differences do exist in the recognition processing of Chinese words. Some of the gender differences could be interpreted as reflecting different strengths and speed of brain activation and others could be interpreted as reflecting the involvement of different neural structures.