[AUDITORY] Corrected: sex differences in auditory processing

Sex differences in auditory processing – updated collection of responses (March 31, 2022)

Original query sent Jan 9, 2022:

Dear List,

I am trying to find papers reporting sex differences in behavioral or neural measures of auditory processing in vertebrates. I'd be grateful for pointers to any references, including review chapters.

Btw, my impression from the papers I've found so far is that females generally outperform males (e.g., refs below), and I wonder if this holds across a larger
set of studies.

Benichov, J. I., Benezra, S. E., Vallentin, D., Globerson, E., Long, M. A., & Tchernichovski, O. (2016). The forebrain song system mediates predictive call timing in female and male zebra finches. Current Biology, 26(3), 309-318.

Kriengwatana, B., Spierings, M. J., & ten Cate, C. (2016). Auditory discrimination learning in zebra finches: effects of sex, early life conditions and stimulus characteristics. Animal Behaviour, 116, 99-112.

Krizman, J., Bonacina, S., & Kraus, N. (2020). Sex differences in subcortical auditory processing only partially explain higher prevalence of language disorders in males. Hearing research, 398, 108075.

Thanks, and best wishes for the new year,

Ani Patel

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Responses:

From Erick Gallun:

I found Karen Helfer's paper on estrogen-related differences in competing speech understanding to be a very interesting study. It would be nice to see someone follow up on this.

Helfer, K. S. (2004). Cross-sectional study of differences in speech understanding between users and nonusers of estrogen replacement therapy. Experimental Aging Research, 30(2), 195-204.

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From Tim Ziemer:

Arne von Ruschkowski gives an overview of gender differences in loudness perception (in German though): https://ediss.sub.uni-hamburg.de/handle/ediss/5262

and argues that the length of the ear canal and the air volume between eardrum and headphone could not be the reasons for the different judgments of male and female participants.

One observation that has been made is that already female newborns exhibit stronger otoacoustic emissions than male newborns:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3085661/

Otoacoustic emissions and auditory evoked potentials are sexually dimporphic:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4163528/

Sex differences in male and female mosquito hearing are huge, and their hearing organs differ a lot.

From Anna Wolf:

We found sex differences in both ear training and musical imagery skills in music students/musicians, see:

Wolf, A., & Kopiez, R. (2018). Development and Validation of the Musical Ear Training Assessment (META). Journal of Research in Music Education, 66, 53-70.

Wolf, A., Kopiez, R., & Platz, F. (2018). Thinking in music: An objective measure of notation-evoked sound imagery in musicians. Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, and Brain, 28(4), 209-221.

For both skills men outperformed women, which replicated in every sample we collected for these papers. My best guess is a difference in motivation in female and male students with music theory and ear training being the most logical and structural type of skill within a music programme (the MINT within music, maybe). Plus probably stereotype threat, since in Germany most music theory staff are male.

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From Arturo Moleti

There are well-known sex differences in otoacoustic emission levels, e.g. McFadden papers, with females outperforming males. You can easily find several references searching for "sex difference OAE", e.g., on Pubmed.
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From Leslie Bernstein

Google: sex differences McFadden

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From Martin Braun

McFadden & Co not only established that females outperform males in SOAE
incidence and levels (by a strikingly huge difference) but also by hearing
threshold in quiet. Interestingly, to my knowledge neither McFadden nor
anybody else could as yet present a convincing theory for the reasons of
these differences. There have been data that outer hair cell (OHC)
physiology is affected by sex hormones, but apparently SOAE researchers and
OHC researchers have been living too much apart and neither of them has
followed this up.

PS: I assume that females are also better in central auditory processing of
speech, but I am not aware of any data in that realm.

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From Sam Mehr

We cited a few papers on this topic in our BBS target article https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32843107. The general pattern, for higher-level auditory tasks, seemed to be minimal-to-zero effects of gender.

Informally, in the many hundreds of thousands of participants who do music perception tasks on our platform internationally, we have found comparably underwhelming sex differences, e.g. on pitch perception, beat alignment, mistuning, etc, but not much of these data are published (yet!)

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From Matthew Joseph Goupell

We did a posthoc analysis of a dataset that may be relevant.

Xie, Z., Shader, M. J., Gordon-Salant, S., Anderson, S. and Goupell, M. J. (2020) “Letter to the Editor: Possible sex effects on the processing of temporal cues in word segments in adult cochlear-implant users,” Trends Hear. 24, 1-2.

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From Alex Francis

I think it’s more complicated than just “females vs. males” - you’re going to have to deal with differences In the role that acoustic signals play for different organisms in different contexts/ecologies. And seasons. My colleague Jeff Lucas has done some work on hormonal and seasonal variation in hearing in birds across different species that occupy different niches:

https://lucaslabpurdue.weebly.com/

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From Massimo Grassi

A few years ago I found this:

Grassi, M. (2010). Sex difference in subjective duration of looming and
receding sounds. Perception, 39(10), 1424-1426.

Looming sounds (ie sounds that increase in level over time) are
perceived as longer than receding sounds (a looming sound reversed in
time). But this perceptually asymmetry seemed larger in females than
males. However, I now think that result was likely a false positive (or
just strictly related to the method of that particular experiment at
best) because in successive (and previous) experiments the sex
difference never emerged again.

In general, I would be cautious about the results reported in
literature. Studies that observe sex differences are often small in
number of participants and results tend to be weak.

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From Manon Grube:

See this paper: Sutherland, M. E., Zatorre, R. J., Watkins, K. E., Hervé, P. Y., Leonard, G., Pike, B. G., ... & Paus, T. (2012). Anatomical correlates of dynamic auditory processing: relationship to literacy during early adolescence. Neuroimage, 60(2), 1287-1295.

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From Sarah Yoho:

See this paper: Yoho, S. E., Borrie, S. A., Barrett, T. S., & Whittaker, D. B. (2019). Are there sex effects for speech intelligibility in American English? Examining the influence of talker, listener, and methodology. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 81(2), 558-570.

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From Jen Krizman:

In addition to our work in humans, which you listed, we also have a recently published paper, in collaboration with Kasia Bieszczad and Elena Rotondo from Rutgers, that replicates and extends our human sex differences in rodents.

Krizman J, Rotondo EK, Nicol T, Kraus N, Bieszczad K (2021) Sex differences in auditory processing vary across estrous cycle. Scientific Reports. 11: 22898

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From Ulf Kalla

When it comes to sex differences I have one article to refer You to. That study is based on quite big number of newborn participants’ ears, with over 12.000 per side for males and over 12.000 per side for females, hence the significant differences for sex should be quite robust.

Berninger, Erik (2007), Characteristics of normal newborn transient-evoked otoacoustic emissions: Ear asymmetries and sex effects, International Journal of Audiology, 46:11, 661 — 669

As stated in the thread the question why is always interesting. One explanation I got is connected to hormones, where the increased level of testosterone is maybe responsible for this sex difference. Maybe also that is an explanation to why males tend to get earlier and harder onset when it comes to age related hearing loss? The last part is my own guess and not yet anchored in any evidence.

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From Eino Partanen:

Here are a few studies in infants:

A study of infants by Angela Friederici and others: Friederici, A. D., Pannekamp, A., Partsch, C. J., Ulmen, U., Oehler, K., Schmutzler, R., & Hesse, V. (2008). Sex hormone testosterone affects language organization in the infant brain. Neuroreport, 19(3), 283-286.

and a similar study in childhood: Schaadt, G., Hesse, V., & Friederici, A. D. (2015). Sex hormones in early infancy seem to predict aspects of later language development. Brain and language, 141, 70-76.

(I find both studies unreliable due to small sample sizes, as generally we see sex differences in small samples but not in large samples, e.g. Wallentin 2009 & 2020.)

There is also a study by Jutta Mueller and others, showing sex differences in auditory processing: Mueller, J. L., Friederici, A. D., & Männel, C. (2012). Auditory perception at the root of language learning. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(39), 15953-15958.

In addition, an intervention study showed sex differences, larger responses in females: Kostilainen, K., Partanen, E., Mikkola, K., Wikström, V., Pakarinen, S., Fellman, V., & Huotilainen, M. (2021). Repeated Parental Singing During Kangaroo Care Improved Neural Processing of Speech Sound Changes in Preterm Infants at Term Age. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 15.

However, a similar study from the same cohort found the opposite effect, with larger responses in males, but the paper is still waiting to be published on the Frontiers website: Partanen, Mårtensson, Hugoson, Huotilainen, Fellman & Ådén (in press). Auditory processing of the brain is enhanced by parental singing for preterm infants. Frontiers in Neuroscience.

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From Deniz Baskent:

If you look for McFadden papers, please also see a commentary we wrote about one of his related papers. The point of this commentary is that maybe sex/gender differences (or race differences also) are not as "well known" as we assume, and there could be a number of confounds in such studies:

https://psyarxiv.com/ghfpv/

When choosing references for such differences, I think it pays to be a bit critical to not potentially spread possibly not very clear or accurate findings.

Ani, your question is a legitimate one, ie, if some effects reported in one small-sample size study would also hold with larger populations, or across a number of studies. What I observe is that often we add an analysis of sex/gender/race factor without a strong background hypothesis for why we should do so, and it feels often this analysis is done just because it has always been done. And then when we find an effect within a small population and for a study that was not necessarily designed for investigating sex differences, we conclude a bit fast that there is such difference. In many listening/speech tests, linguistic skills, musical background or aptitude, own or parents' education level (especially for children), or other demographic factors may actually play a larger role, but somehow instead of such potentially more relevant factors, gender/sex difference analysis is conducted. I am worried this leads to misleading conclusions.

Where a sex difference is reported, it is sometimes done based on great many assumptions. One big assumption is that what one reports as gender is equivalent to one's sex too. For example, if there is a female-sex related hormone that may have an effect on a hearing-related mechanism, then one's reported gender may or may not indicate the presence of such hormone. How could we know that? Same goes with race effects. One may identify themselves as African-American without having dark skin, while the hearing-effects related to skin color have been shown for melatonin levels. Hence, without measuring melatonin or skin color per se, and just asking participants their self-identified race, again, may lead to wrong conclusions.

Where there seems consistent differences between males and females in literature seems in the hearing thresholds in older age groups, and often these are large-sample studies and seem to hold across different populations across studies. (By the way, it looks like this difference seems to become smaller with younger generations.) An idea related to this is female hormones potentially having protective effects for hearing, as mentioned above, but another idea is environmental factors, such as males being more exposed to louder environments, especially in older generations, such as working in factories with no or minimal hearing protection.

In short, these differences may or may not be there, but I would not say these are well-known. It is not a given. Instead, I would suggest that we all be careful about what a study really measured and was the finding valid; was it really designed to identify such differences,did it use correct paradigms, did it choose appropriate populations, are conclusions interpreted correctly? Also in own studies, are we looking into such differences for good reasons, based on prior work and evidence for it, or just because it has always been done this way and it is easy to throw this factor into the analysis?

This would be my long answer to a seemingly short question. :) Hope it helps.

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End of replies.