Sex Differences in the Reading Process Revealed by a Letter-Detection Task

Four experiments used a task in which males and females had to work through a passage and circle instances of a target letter. Coltheart, Hull and Slater (1975) have previously used this task to show that females have greater difficulty than males in detecting target letters, especially letters in the and other silent letters. The four experiments failed to replicate Coltheart et al.'s findings and, in fact, frequently found significant sex differences in the opposite direction. This discrepancy in results could not be accounted for in terms of procedural differences between the two studies. It was concluded that Coltheart et al.'s (1975) results with the letter detection task may not be reliable.

• Publication year

  1979

• Venue

  Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

• Publication date

  1979-05-01

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1080/14640747908400730PMID 461688
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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