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This chapter presents two particular sorts of differences, gender and age. Sex differences in language have been known and speculated about for a long time, largely because they are among the most obvious of the cognitive differences. Sex differences in verbal ability have one important consequence for the psycholinguist: we have to be careful to control for, or at least take account of, gender in our experiments. Language is relatively spared by ageing. As we might expect from the foregoing, those aspects of language that depend on declarative memory retrieval are more sensitive than those that depend on procedural memory. Although generally language is better preserved than other cognitive abilities, there is an exception. Primary progressive aphasia is a type of dementia that characteristically begins with the prominent progressive loss of language abilities.