Sex Differences In L2 Lexical Semantic Processing And Working Memory Capacity

Processing speed and working memory are two of the four factors of Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-â…¢ (Wechsler, 1997). Both processing speed and working memory have much to do with second language acquisition, specifically they are related to language comprehension. Semantic. processing speed is related to the sentence processing and prose comprehension performance; working memory is said to be crucial in reading and listening comprehension. According to some previous studies, males and females do differ in some cognitive abilities, including processing speed and working memory. And "sex may be an important factor in test performance"(Slate, 1998). The study is intended to reveal the possible sex differences in semantic processing speed and working memory capacity; and through our effort, we hope to broaden the understanding of sex differences in semantic processing speed and working memory capacity in second language learning.To this end, two experiments have been conducted under the guidance of two research questions:1) Are there any significant sex differences in L2 semantic processing of adult Chinese learners of English? If any (if not), what are the possible explanations?2) Are there any significant sex differences in working memory capacity of adult Chinese learners of English? If any (if not), what are the possible explanations?Experiment 1 examined the hypothesis that there is a sex difference in L2 semantic processing of adult Chinese learners of English. In the very experiment, a primed lexical decision task was used to measure the L2 semantic processing speed of30 male adult Chinese learners of English and 30 female adult Chinese learners of English. The result suggested that there were no significant sex differences in L2 semantic processing speed. However, the more detailed and further analyses showed that the females responded to the words and nonwords relatively faster than the males. The sex difference was small in L2 semantic processing speed.Experiment 2 tested the hypothesis that there is a sex difference in working memory capacity of adult Chinese learners of English. In this experiment, a reading span task was employed to measure the working memory capacity of adult Chinese learners of English (The same subjects of experiment 1 took part in this experiment). The result showed that there was a significant sex difference favoring females in working memory capacity of L2 learners, namely, the females had much larger working memory reading span than the males.With these findings of the current study we can tentatively conclude that there are sex differences in some cognitive abilities of these L2 learners though there is no smarter sex. What's more, the study endeavored to explain these differences by employing a psychobiosocial model. Implications and limitations of the study were offered in the end.