Gender differences in the lexical retrieval of emotionally valenced words : the case of adult Saudi EFL learners

Abstract EN

The issue of gender differences in relation to lexical retrieval merits further study, particularly within the context of emotive words.

The present study is centred on the possibility of finding gender differences between Saudi EFL adult students in retrieving positive, neutral and negative words.

Due to the undecided positions of many researchers on whether there are differences between men and women in linguistic performance on different linguistic and non-verbal stimuli, a null hypothesis was formulated.

The study adopted a quasi-experimental design.

This type of design attempts to approach the rigour of an experimental design (Gravetter and Forzano, 2006).

The sample was 70 Saudi EFL learners, with 35 men and 35 women.

Two experiments were run: an RT experiment and a free-recall one, including positive, neutral and negative emotive words.

The findings of the first experiment revealed no significant differences between the three types of words.

The findings of the second experiment uncovered statistically significant differences between males and females in the retrieval of neutrally valenced words.

The study has implications related to the way emotive vocabulary can be incorporated into any university curriculum.