In an examination of the effects of sex, practice, and various stimulus letters on performance of a simple 1-min. verbal fluency task, each of 8 male and 8 female undergraduates was tested with 8 stimulus letters in a single session. Women scored higher than men on each letter and generated reliably more words across the whole session. Neither men nor women improved reliably from Trial 1 to Trial 2, but women only showed improvement from the first to the second half of the session. Performance on different letters correlated reliably with number of pages devoted to respective letters in the dictionary.
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