Sex Roles, Vol. 42, Nos. 5/6, 2000 Brief Reports Girls Not Boys Show Gender-Connotation Encoding from Print Susan M. Perez and Daniel W. Kee 1 California State University, Fullerton The present study examines gender differences in children’s encoding of gender-connotation from words. The release from proactive interference method was used to measure gender-connotation encoding. Forty-eight third- grade children attending a public elementary school serving a predominantly White middle-socioeconomic-status community participated and were pre- sented with stimulus words in print. The design of the study can be character- ized as a two (gender) by two (condition: control vs. experimental) by four (trials) factorial. Results revealed reliable proactive interference buildup and release for gender-connotation for girls, but not for boys. This new finding, taken together with extant research, demonstrates that while both boys and girls have the ability to encode gender-connotation from aurally presented words, the spontaneous activation of gender-connotation attributes with print is not guaranteed for boys. Schneider and Pressley’s (1997) review of memory development concluded that ‘‘sex differences were not even examined in most studies of children’s memory’’ and that ‘‘we still know almost nothing about whether there are sex differences in memory development’’ (p. 323). Recent research and theory suggests that detection of gender differences in memory requires careful attention to developmental level, materials used, and the nature of the memory process implicated (Halpern, 1992; Halpern & Wright, 1996; Jones et al., 1996; Signorella, Bigler, and Liben, 1993, 1994; Walters & Andreassen, 1983; Waters & Schreiber, 1991). The focus of the present study concerns the ‘‘availability’’ or ‘‘activa- tion’’ of semantic attributes in memory. The procedure developed by 1 To whom correspondence should be addressed at Department of Psychology, California State University, Fullerton, Fullerton, California 92634; e-mail: DKEE@Fullerton.edu. 439 0360-0025/00/0300-0439$18.00/0  2000 Plenum Publishing Corporation