Dyslexia in relation to cerebral dominance and temporal analysis

Abstract

Normal readers and dyslexics were compared on a number of perceptual tasks. In relation to the normal subjects, the dyslexics were significantly inferior in dealing with the temporal aspects of nonverbal auditory and visual information. The dyslexics also fared significantly worse on tests of manual dexterity and dichotic listening; and, on the dichotic listening task, in contrast to the normal readers who showed a right-ear superiority, dyslexics tended to be better in reporting material delivered to the left ear. A correlational analysis based on the scores of all subjects revealed that the measures of reading skill, temporal analysis crossmodal matching, and dichotic listening were significantly related to each other. The results are discussed in relation to cerebral dominance for language and in relation to language development generally.