Diferenças cognitivas entre homens e mulheres na produção de associações livres de palavras

Abstract

Introduction: Although several studies have shown differences in cognitive performance between men and women, it is not yet known whether these differences occur in tasks involving the free word association (WA). Objective: To compare the semantic distances between word pairs produced by WA between men and women. Method: We applied a WA task in 68 adult volunteers (52 women and 16 men). The WA task consisted of writing the fi rst word that came to mind after viewing another word offered as a stimulus. In the absence of a corpus in Portuguese, suitable for the measurement of semantic distances, word were translated to English and the semantic distance between each pair of stimulus-associated word was quantifi ed in a systematic and representative English corpus (Wordnet). This procedure removed the polysemies typical of Portuguese, but preserved the semantic macro-structure common to both languages. Results: We found that semantic distances of WA produced by men were signifi cantly smaller than the distances observed in WA produced by women. Conclusion: The results are consistent with the notion that women have a more abstract reasoning than men.