Word processing is essential for people to express and communicate their thoughts and feelings in order t Importance of emotional management for leadership development o establish social and interpersonal relationships. This report helps measure how words are distinguished from nonwords as well as related words and nonrelated words, in terms of time and accuracy. The additional variable investigated is the gender differences and how it affects the semantic priming. The sample of 139 participants from York University took part in the experi Importance of emotional management for leadership development ment known as the Lexical Decision Task. The RT and ACC were recorded which concluded that words are faster and more accurately identified than nonwords and related words are quickly recognized as compared to unrelated words. There was no significant correlation found between gender and the RT and ACC of the participants in the task Gender Differences in Word Processing Language processing is a complex mechanism that is widel Importance of emotional management for leadership development y researched in the fields of psychology and psycholinguistics. It involves expressing and comprehending one’s thoughts and feelings through words in order to communicate with other people. This report will focus on word processing and semantic priming. Ashcraft (1998) suggested that “any stimulus that is presented first, to see if it influences later information”. Semantic priming occurs when an individual responds to a target word faster when it is preceded by a word related to the target word as compared to an unrelated prime (word). This report also explores how gender differences can affect semantic priming or word processing. The experiment typically used to measure this is called the Lexicon Decision Task which will later be discussed in the Methods of this report. This study is important as it provides more knowledge about the way language is processed. The mai Importance of emotional management for leadership development n study done by Meyer and Schvaneveldt (1971) reported that the participants responded faster to commonly associated words as compared to unrelated words. The next experiment consisted of showing pairs of words, nonwords or both. In this, the subjects were faster in identifying the pairs of words than nonwords and when both were presented as a pair, the subjects responded to “No” faster when the first string was a nonword. A study by Wirth et al. (2007) concluded that the initial lexical-semantic access is  Importance of emotional management for leadership development almost the same in males and females. However, women conduct a deeper semantic analysis which results in women earlier and longer lasting effect resulting in faster processing of related words. Therefore, this study shows that the depth of processing is significant in the semantic analysis.>