Preliminary data from two samples of autistic children and adults and an assessment procedure appropriate for lower-functioning autistic Ss revealed a dramatic shift away from right-handedness in both autistic samples, due to a raised incidence of two phenotypes: manifest left-handedness and ambiguous handedness. (Author/CL)

Questionnaires completed by 83 families of autistic children (5-23 years old) revealed that significantly more autistic children were non-right-handers than either their siblings or their parents. Findings suggest that increased mixed- and left-handedness in autistic persons is not due to inheritance. (CL)

In this study, we used a novel cognitive paradigm and event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (ER-fMRI) to investigate the neural substrates involved in processing three different types of sentences. Participants read either metaphoric ("Some surgeons are butchers"), literal ("Some surgeons are fathers"), or non-meaningful sentences…

The cerebral regulation of cardiovascular functioning varies along both a lateral and a longitudinal axis. The parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems are lateralized to the left and right cerebral hemispheres, respectively. Further, the frontal lobes are known to be inhibitory in nature, whereas the temporal lobes are excitatory. However,…

Used two tapping tasks to determine whether individual infants' right- or left-hand preference for unimanual and bimanual tapping corresponded to their handedness in bimanual manipulation tasks during the second year of life. Also examined whether manual tapping preference occurred before or after the onset of bimanual handedness. (JMB)

The handedness of Leonardo da Vinci is controversial. Although there is little doubt that many of his well-attributed drawings were drawn with the left hand, the hatch marks of the shading going downwards from left to right, it is not clear that he was a natural left-hander, there being some suggestion that he may have become left-handed as the…

Studies have reported a right visual field (RVF) advantage for coherent motion detection by deaf and hearing signers but not non-signers. Yet two studies [Bosworth R. G., & Dobkins, K. R. (2002). Visual field asymmetries for motion processing in deaf and hearing signers. "Brain and Cognition," 49, 170-181; Samar, V. J., & Parasnis, I. (2005).…

Sex differences on language and visuospatial tasks are of great interest, with differences in hemispheric laterality hypothesized to exist between males and females. Some functional imaging studies examining sex differences have shown that males are more left lateralized on language tasks and females are more right lateralized on visuospatial…

Six early treated children with phenylketonuria (PKU) were compared at 9 to 14 years of age on a neuropsychological measure with three groups of children with documented neurological disorders. PKU Ss had overall level of neuropsychological impairment similar to that of brain-damaged groups. PKU Ss did not show consistent pattern of…

The present investigation focussed on the neural substrates underlying linguistic distinctions that are signalled by prosodic cues. A production experiment was conducted to examine the ability of left- (LHD) and right- (RHD) hemisphere-damaged patients and normal controls to use temporal and fundamental frequency cues to disambiguate sentences…

Sixty-five right- and left-handed preschool and school children were tested on three reach-to-grasp tasks of different levels of complexity, performed in three space locations. Our goal was to evaluate how the effect of attentional information related to object location interacts with task complexity and degree of handedness on children's hand…

The present study aimed to examine how differences in functional lateralisation of language are related to interindividual variations in interhemispheric connectivity. Utilising an fMRI silent word-generation paradigm, 89 left- and right-handed subjects were subdivided into four lateralisation subgroups. Applying morphological and diffusion-tensor…

The control of human limb movement has been the focus of research for more than a century. A major issue to emerge from this work is the manner in which the central nervous system regulates electromyographic (EMG) activity to produce movements that differ in distance, velocity, and movement time. However, the different methods of analysis often…

Cerebral laterality was examined for third, fourth, and fifth grade deaf (N=30) and hearing (N=30) Ss. The experimental task involved the processing of word and picture stimuli presented singly to the right and left visual hemifields. The analyses indicated that deaf children were faster than the hearing children in overall processing efficiency,…

Most of 32 learning disabled children (seven to 14 years old) with neurological lateralization characteristics marked by right and left hemispheres had a normal CT (computerized tomography) scan. (CL)