Sex differences in the reading process revealed by a letter-detection task

Four experiments used a task in which males and females had to work through a passage and circle instances of a target letter. Coltheart, Hull and Slater (1975) have previously used this task to show that females have greater difficulty than males in detecting target letters, especially letters in the and other silent letters. The four experiments failed to replicate Coltheart et al.'s findings and, in fact, frequently found significant sex differences in the opposite direction. This discrepancy in results could not be accounted for in terms of procedural differences between the two studies. It was concluded that Coltheart et al.'s (1975) results with the letter detection task may not be reliable.