Gender affects word retrieval of certain categories in semantic fluency tasks

Recent studies suggest that gender influences phonetically-cued fluency and some semantic memory tasks. In this study we analysed the effect of demographic variables on semantic fluency tasks. The semantic categories considered were: animals, fruits, tools and vehicles. The influence of age and education was common to all the categories considered and seems a general characteristic of the semantic fluency task. Gender had a significant effect only with fruits and tools, but a diverging role: females fared better with fruits and males with tools. We discuss whether the source of the gender effect should be located at the level of the semantic representation of each category or at the level of item recall in the short time (one minute) granted for the task.