Lefties

Elizabeth Bates bates at CRL.UCSD.EDU
Wed Jan 7 23:31:44 UTC 1998


Aside from the fact that handedness is not a dichotomy (as I said in
a previous posting, it is a continuous and J-shaped distribution), it
is also worth noting that definitions of handedness in the neuropsychology
literature (an *IMMENSE* literature, by the way) are usually not restricted
to the hand one uses for writing.  There are a number of handedness
questionnaires that are widely used in neuropsychology and/or
psycholinguistics, tapping into many different aspects of hand use,
and also (in some cases) side preferences for other body parts
(e.g. the foot used to kick a ball; the preferred eye for looking
into a telescope).  In fact, because left-handed writing is the behavior that
has been suppressed most often in certain cultural contexts, writing
may not be the strongest index of lateralization and behavioral asymmetry.
-liz bates



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