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LATERAL PREFERENCES IN 8- TO 15-YEAR-OLD BRAZILIAN CHILDREN ASSESSED WITH THE EDINBURGH INVENTORY: DIFFERENT MEASURES OF HANDEDNESS AND COMPARISON WITH YOUNGER CHILDREN AND ADULTS
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Fundação Oswaldo Cruz. Instituto Fernandes Figueira. Departamento de Pediatria. Setor de Neurociências. Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brasil
Universidade Federal Fluminense. Setor de Neurociências Niterói, RJ, Brasil
Universidade Federal Fluminense. Setor de Neurociências Niterói, RJ, Brasil
Abstract
This article completes a series of 3 studies on the lateral preferences of Brazilians of
different age ranges. In previous reports, we assessed the lateral preferences of adults
ranging in age from 20 to 72 years (Brito, Brito, Paumgartten,&Lins, 1989) and 4- to
7-year-old schoolchildren (Brito, Lins, Paumgartten,&Brito, 1992). In this study, we
evaluated the lateral preferences of 625 children with ages ranging from 8 to 15 years
with different measures of handedness derived from the Edinburgh Inventory
(Oldfield, 1971). We found significant age and sex effects which depended on the
measure of handedness. Factor analysis of the inventory revealed a single factor.
Comparison of the data with those reported previously confirmed a sex effect on the
distribution of handedness categories. Additionally, we found that the distribution of
handedness categories in 4- to 7-year-old children and 8- to 15-year-old children differs
from that found in adults, and removal of inventory items with reduced factorial
validity (opening a box for both samples of children and broom for adults) accentuates
these differences. Children are more mixed-handed and less right-handed. Item analyses
of the data indicated that these differences are only partially dependent on the degree
of novelty of the tasks included in the inventory. The implications of these life
span age trends in laterality for current hypotheses involving experience-induced
neural plasticity in interaction with environmental factors are discussed.
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