Brain activation pattern during a verbal fluency test in healthy male and female volunteers: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study

Sex differences in executive speech tasks, favoring women, have been noted in behavioral studies and functional imaging studies. In the present study ten female and ten male volunteers underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging in a conventional block design. All subjects were selected on the basis of high performance on the verbal fluency task. Regions of activation were detected after performance of a covert lexical verbal fluency task inside the scanner. Men and women who did not differ significantly in verbal fluency task performance showed a very similar pattern of brain activation. Our data argue against genuine between-sex differences in cerebral activation patterns during lexical verbal fluency activities when confounding factors like performance differences are excluded.