The purpose of this study was to determine how retarded readers differed from normal readers in the various ways laterality is manifested. An additional purpose was to investigate the development of laterality as seen across several age levels. Subjects were 80 white male 9-, 10-, 11-, and 12-year-olds from regular classrooms in suburban middle-class public schools. Forty of the subjects were retarded readers, and 40 were normal children at or above the expected reading levels for their ages. Each experimental subject was matched with a control on age, sex, race, social class, and performance IQ and was tested individually on 10 laterality variables. These dimensions of laterality tested were (1) the sensorimotor aspects (manual preference, manual strength, manual dexterity, visual preference, controlling-eye-monocular, controlling-eye-binocular) and (2) the perceptual-cognitive aspects (finger differentiation, lateral awareness, ear asymmetry, verbal intelligence). It was found that the retarded readers differed from the normal readers on all perceptual-cognitive measures and in the incidence of noncontrolling eye. The retarded readers also had poorer performance on lateral awareness, finger differentiation, and verbal intelligence. No difference between the groups was noted for manual laterality. Tables and references are included. (Author/CM)