Hemispheric specialization for speech perception in language deficient kindergarten children

Twenty right-handed kindergarten children with superior language skills and twenty with deficient language skills (as defined by performance on an elicited sentence repetition task) were tested (1) for hemispheric specialization for speech perception with a dichotic CV syllable task and (2) for relative manual proficiency by means of a battery of hand tasks. Reading readiness and aspects of other cognitive abilities were also assessed. The superior children evidenced a mean right-ear advantage of 14.5%, which is consistent with normal values reported by other investigators using the same stimuli. The language deficient group evidenced essentially no mean ear advantage (0.5) with half of these subjects exhibiting left-ear superiority. The findings suggest relationships among cerébral dominance, language proficiency (including reading readiness), and general cognitive functioning.