Sex differences in word perception are an important issue in reading. Previous studies that used various word perception tasks have indicated that girls outperform boys. The composite paradigm is a typical task for measuring visual perception and was employed here to identify the age at which sex differences in the perceptual processing of Chinese characters emerge. We tested 124 typically developed children from junior (6–7 years) and middle grades (9–11 years), studying in a primary school. Chinese character processing was better in congruent than incongruent conditions for all children with one or more years of experience in learning Chinese characters. Importantly, girls in the middle grade showed better discrimination sensitivity performances than boys, whereas no sex differences were found in the junior grade. These results suggest that sex differences in the visual perceptual processing of Chinese characters begin to emerge in middle-grade children.

单词感知的性别差异是阅读中的一个重要问题。以前使用各种单词感知任务的研究表明，女孩的表现优于男孩。复合范式是测量视觉感知的典型任务，在这里被用来确定汉字感知处理中出现性别差异的年龄。我们测试了 124 名在小学学习的初中（6-7 岁）和初中（9-11 岁）发育正常的儿童。对于所有具有一年或一年以上汉字学习经验的儿童来说，汉字在一致条件下的处理优于在不一致条件下。重要的是，初中女生比男生表现出更好的辨别敏感度表现，而初中则没有发现性别差异。