Gender differences in reading in school-aged children: an early ERP study

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Developmental Psychology
• Linguistics

Background:

• Language lateralization, particularly for auditory processing, is established early in preschool.
• Linguistic processes in reading show slower lateralization development, paralleling reading acquisition.
• Adult studies indicate limited gender differences in language lateralization, but this remains under-explored in children.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate early-onset gender-related differences in language lateralization during reading in school-aged children.
• To compare brain activation patterns between boys and girls in orthographic, phonological, and semantic tasks.
• To determine if adult-like gender lateralization patterns are present in 10-year-old children.

Main Methods:

• An experiment involving 14 boys and 14 girls aged 10 years.
• Utilized electrophysiological recordings (early evoked potentials) during single-word reading.
• Included Orthographic, Phonological, and Semantic linguistic tasks.

Main Results:

• Boys displayed bilateral N150 activation across all tasks.
• Girls showed right-lateralized N150 in phonological and orthographic tasks.
• Boys had left-lateralized N350 in the phonological task, while girls exhibited bilateral N350 activation.

Conclusions:

• Results support the hypothesis of early-onset gender differences in language lateralization.
• Reduced left-hemisphere language lateralization in females is detectable during early reading skill development.
• These findings suggest distinct neurodevelopmental trajectories for language processing in reading between genders from a young age.