Neural correlates of sex differences in communicative gestures and speech comprehension: A preliminary study

ABSTRACT

The goal of this study was to investigate whether the semantic processing of the audiovisual combination of communicative gestures with speech differs between men and women. We recorded event-related brain potentials in women and men during the presentation of communicative gestures that were either congruent or incongruent with the speech.

Our results showed that incongruent gestures elicited an N400 effect over frontal sites compared to congruent ones in both groups. Moreover, the females showed an earlier N2 response to incongruent stimuli than congruent ones, while larger sustained negativity and late positivity in response to incongruent stimuli was observed only in males. These results suggest that women rapidly recognize and process audiovisual combinations of communicative gestures and speech (as early as 300 ms) whereas men analyze them at the later stages of the process.

KEYWORDS:

• Event-related potentials
• N400
• N2
• gestures
• speech
• sex differences

Acknowledgments

Mirella Manfredi was supported by a FAPESP post-doctoral research grant (2015/00553-5). Paulo S. Boggio is supported by a CNPq research grant (311641/2015-6).

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the S?o Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) [2015/00553-5].