Journal article
Stage 2 Registered Report: There is no appreciable relationship between strength of hand preference and language ability in 6- to 7-year-old children
- Abstract:
-
Background: Weak or inconsistent hand preference has been postulated to be a risk factor for developmental language delay. Following on from our Registered Stage 1 report this study assessed the extent to which variations in language skills are associated with the strength of hand preference.
Methods: Data are drawn from a large sample ( N = 569) of 6- to 7-year-old children unselected for ability, assessed at two time points, 6 months apart. Hand preference was assessed using the Quantitative Hand Preference (QHP) task and five uni-manual motor tasks. Language skills (expressive and receptive vocabulary, receptive grammar, and morphological awareness) were assessed with standardized measures.
Results: We found QHP scores did not distinguish children with weaker language skills from those with stronger language skills and the correlation between QHP scores and language ability was negligible in this study. Hand preference on the QHP task was significantly stronger among right-handed than left-handed children and left-handed children were typically inconsistent in the hand used across different tasks.
Conclusions: The findings presented here fail to provide any support for the theory that weak cerebral lateralisation (as assessed here by the QHP task) places children at risk of language difficulties.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
Actions
Access Document
- Files:
-
-
(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 1.5MB, Terms of use)
-
- Publisher copy:
- 10.12688/wellcomeopenres.15254.1
Authors
- Publisher:
- F1000 Research
- Journal:
- Wellcome Open Research More from this journal
- Volume:
- 4
- Article number:
- 81
- Publication date:
- 2019-05-13
- Acceptance date:
- 2019-06-19
- DOI:
- ISSN:
-
2398-502X
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
-
pubs:1003174
- UUID:
-
uuid:954646c0-233d-42f5-b956-ef1b87382d48
- Local pid:
-
pubs:1003174
- Source identifiers:
-
1003174
- Deposit date:
-
2019-08-24
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Pritchard et al
- Copyright date:
- 2019
- Notes:
- © 2019 Pritchard VE et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
If you are the owner of this record, you can report an update to it here: Report update to this record