Abstract des Autors

Research reveals that mixed laterality is much more common among left-handed than right-handed people. Left handers also experience more difficulties wwith awareness of laterality and right-left discrimination, which help in perceiving body movements in space and time. Both these shortcomings may lead to poor motor co-ordination, speed and accuracy on the part of the left-handed child. The gross motor co-ordination of 23 left-handers between the age of six and nine years was measured and compared to 23 right-handed children of the same age and sex to establish if the above-mentioned difficulties are a disadvantage to them. The results showed that right-handed children display better co-ordination, although the difference between the groups was not significant. The standard deviation of the gross motor co-ordination of the left-handed group was significantly higher (p<0,01) than the right-handed group, which may suggest that the co-ordination of some of the left-handed children was influenced by the high percentage mixed laterality (78,2% compared to 8,6% in the right-handed group) found in their group. The two-way ANOVA statistical procedure was applied to compare the left-handed group with mixed laterality (n=18) to the right-handed group without mixed laterality (n=21). The Levine test showed a statistically significant difference (p<0.02) in variance between these groups, which substantiates the above findings. Verf.-Referat