Incidence of left-handed writers and the inverted writing position in a sample of 2194 German elementary school children

Abstract

In a sample of 2194 German elementary school children, 6.9% of the females and 9.5% of the males wrote with the left hand. The proportion of left-handers writing with the inverted writing position was much higher than in comparable Canadian samples, particularly in the early grades. The higher incidence in early grades was related to the earlier introduction of cursive style writing in the German sample. There was a significant effect of writing position on the directional consistency of the letter shafts in the writing samples: noninverted writers were more inconxistent in their letter shaft orientation within and between words than inverted writers. The results stress adaptation to the technical demands of left-handed writing in the genesis of the inverted writing position, in support of recent studies ( Guiard and Millerat, Neuropsychologia 22, 535–538, 1984) that come to similar conclusions.