Women are thought to fare better in verbal abilities, especially in verbal-fluency and verbal-memory tasks. However, the last meta-analysis on sex/gender differences in verbal fluency dates from 1988. Although verbal memory has only recently been investigated meta-analytically, a comprehensive meta-analysis is lacking that focuses on verbal memory as it is typically assessed, for example, in neuropsychological settings. On the basis of 496 effect sizes and 355,173 participants, in the current meta-analysis, we found that women/girls outperformed men/boys in phonemic fluency (ds = 0.12–0.13) but not in semantic fluency (ds = 0.01–0.02), for which the sex/gender difference appeared to be category-dependent. Women/girls also outperformed men/boys in recall (d = 0.28) and recognition (ds = 0.12–0.17). Although effect sizes are small, the female advantage was relatively stable over the past 50 years and across lifetime. Published articles reported stronger female advantages than unpublished studies, and first authors reported better performance for members of their own sex/gender. We conclude that a small female advantage in phonemic fluency, recall, and recognition exists and is partly subject to publication bias. Considerable variance suggests further contributing factors, such as participants’ language and country/region.

人们认为女性在语言能力方面表现更好，尤其是在语言流利度和语言记忆任务方面。然而，最后一次关于言语流畅性方面的性别差异的荟萃分析可以追溯到 1988 年。尽管言语记忆最近才被进行荟萃分析研究，但缺乏针对通常评估的言语记忆的全面荟萃分析。例如，在神经心理学环境中。基于 496 个效应量和 355,173 名参与者，在当前的荟萃分析中，我们发现女性/女孩在语音流畅性（d s = 0.12–0.13）方面优于男性/男孩，但在语义流畅性（d s = 0.01– ）方面则不然。 0.02），其中性别差异似乎与类别相关。女性/女孩在回忆（ d = 0.28）和识别（d s = 0.12–0.17）方面也优于男性/男孩。尽管效应很小，但女性的优势在过去 50 年和整个一生中相对稳定。已发表的文章报告了比未发表的研究更强的女性优势，第一作者报告了同性别成员的更好表现。我们得出的结论是，女性在音素流畅性、记忆力和识别能力方面存在较小的优势，并且在一定程度上受到出版偏见的影响。相当大的差异表明了进一步的影响因素，例如参与者的语言和国家/地区。