Dichotic listening originally was a means of studying attention. Half a century ago Doreen Kimura parlayed the dichotic method into a noninvasive indicator of lateralized cerebral language representation. The ubiquitous right-ear advantage (REA) for verbal material was accepted as a concomitant of left-sided language lateralization and…

Research is reviewed concerning the current state of knowledge about normal hemispheric specialization; distinctions among such terms as dominance, laterality, and lateralization; and models of abnormal cerebral organization in dyslexic children. The question of dyslexic subtypes is undertaken along such dimensions as handedness, eyedness, and…

Forty-two right-handed preschool children listened to dichotic presentations of digit names and were told to report only the digit arriving at the designated ear. A significant right-ear superiority was found, demonstrating a left lateralization of verbal processing in children as young as three years of age. (Author/JMB)

Reviews pertinent developmental and neuropsychological literature and arrives at a hypothesis relating the left brain lateralization of speech to the origin of early naming as part of selective (right-biased) orienting to perceived salience or change. (Author/SS)

This review of the literature on laterality research concludes that, despite advances in the classification accuracy of laterality methods, definitive conclusions about hemispheric specialization in individual cases of dyslexic children cannot be drawn. Event-related measurements of cerebral metabolism promise to complement but not replace…

Connectionistic notions of hemispheric specialization and use are incompatible with the network organization of the human brain. Although brain organization has correspondence with phenomena at more complex levels of analysis, the correspondence is not categorical in nature, as has been claimed by the left-brain/right-brain theorists. (Author/GC)

Focuses on the differential representation of mental functions between the two human cerebral hemispheres. The manner in which right hemisphere function laterizes in childhood was studied in 98 five- to twelve-year-old children. (CM)