Transient sex differences during development on two auditory tasks attributable to earlier maturation in males

Recent evidence suggests that the development of naive performance on some auditory perceptual tasks can continue well into adolescence. Of interest here was whether there are sex differences in the maturation rate on three such tasks, temporal‐interval discrimination, tone detection in forward masking, and tone detection in backward masking. To investigate this issue, performance was compared between males and females in multiple age groups on these three tasks (n per sex in each age group=9–20). There were no sex differences for backward masking. However, males reached adult‐like performance earlier than females on the other two tasks: forward masking (males at ∼12 years, females at ∼15 years) and temporal‐interval discrimination (males at 14 years, females at >14 years, on each of three separate conditions). Surprisingly, the male advantage occurred only during adolescence. Thus, on two of the three late‐developing auditory abilities examined, males matured more quickly than females, but did not differ...