Abstract: Sex differences in language processing are always the hot topic of linguistic and psychological research. The advent of neuroimaging techniques (including ERPs and fMRI) provided new techniques and produced new evidence in this area. A large number of studies have been devoted to functional differences across sexes in the phonological, orthographic and semantic processing at lexical level, sentence processing, passage processing and verbal learning and memory and so on. Moreover, Researchers also shed light on the influence of differences in grey matter distribution, the different size of corpus callosum and hormonal level variations on language processing between males and females. However, those studies reached different and even conflicting conclusions. The discrepancies in the literature have been explained by time demand of different tasks, female advantage on the declarative memory and different methodological consideration and so on. Although there have been considerable studies on sex differences in language processing, the topic still needs further exploration and explanation in the future.

Key words: language processing, sex differences, neural mechanisms, lateralization, bilateralization