The left side of the brain has been said to process speech along with logical, rational, convergent, objective, and sequential tasks. The right side of the brain is thought to process nonverbal, spatial, musical, and analogical information. This paper discusses the research on brain hemisphericity from the perspectives of traditional and…

Vertical and lateral integration are two important nervous system integrations that affect the development of oral behaviors. There are three progressions in the vertical integration process for speech nervous system development: R-complex speech (ritualistic, memorized expressions), limbic speech (emotional expressions), and cortical speech…

Evidence suggests that the neurological substrate of emotional behavior is lateralized by brain hemisphere early in life. A study examined the emotional expressions of preterm infants, some of whom had unilateral periventrical echodensities (PVE), as a model for addressing this issue. The study population of 25 preterm infants was videotaped at 3…

A study was undertaken to learn whether involvement of the brain's right hemisphere in auditory language processing, a phenomenon found in a previous study of Crow-English bilinguals, was language-specific. Alpha blocking response as measured by electroencephalography (EEG) was used as an indicator of brain activity. It was predicted that (1)…

A review of research was conducted on the possibility of a sensitive period for the acquisition of native-like pronunciation in a second language, as well as on related questions concerning the universality of this phenomenon, age factors, biological versus cultural origins, and developmental psychology. The review showed variation in studies and…

Implications of two studies conducted by the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) at the University of West Florida (Pensacola) regarding electrophysiological determinants of cognitive style (CS) are discussed. Most of the IHMC's research focuses on bimodal processing theory, according to which the human brain has at least two…

This study examined gender differences in laterality, socialization, and educational achievement in fourth graders and determined which characteristics predicted mathematical and language achievement. The participants were four fourth grade classes comprised of 32 boys and 45 girls at an elementary school in a small rural town. Measures used were…

Studies of the human brain suggest that cerebral dominance, the preference for either the right or the left hemisphere to direct the body's behavior, plays a causal role in distinctive learning styles and behavior patterns. The two halves of the brain are physically almost identical at birth, but childhood experiences which utilize one hemisphere…

A study designed to examine biological, sociological, and early maturational correlates of intelligence collected data prospectively, from birth to 15 years of age, on a sample of 987 black children. Multiple indicators of eight independent and three dependent variables were tested in a structural equation model. Altogether, clear sex differences…

The psychometric properties of a paper-and-pencil instrument for assessing individual differences in cerebral dominance are explored. The instrument, Your Style of Learning and Thinking (SOLAT), contains 50 multiple-choice questions. The study subjects consisted of three groups: 235 undergraduate and graduate students, 124 undergraduate and…

Analysis of 165 studies (representing the testing of 1,418,899 subjects) that reported data on gender differences in verbal ability indicated a slight female superiority in performance. The difference is so small that it appears that gender differences in verbal ability no longer exist. A major goal was also to define age trends in the pattern of…

Second language educators need to examine in greater depth the learning processes of young children in order to provide them with the kind of teaching they need in order to really learn. This means searching other fields to learn as much as possible about: questioning strategies and the development of critical thinking skills; hemispheric…

Sex differences in cerebral organization and functioning, and the apparent superiority of males in spatial ability are examined in this paper. Attention is given to several kinds of cognitive and perceptual tasks in which sex differences in spatial ability have been shown to exist; among these are tasks involving: (1) recall and detection of…

This on-going study explores the hypothesis that stock fund managers who underperform do so because they make bad decisions, and examines whether their choices can be improved by using a decision model that invokes principles of brain hemispheric consensus. The study, begun in fall 1999, involves two groups of business students: the control group…

Individual differences in perceptual information processing were tested using 327 ten year old children, with verbal tasks representing successive information processing and spatial tasks representing simultaneous information processing. Three sets of tasks, (1) visual/reconstruction (V/R), (2) visual/verbal (V/VL), and (3) verbal/reconstruction…