Cerebral laterality in deaf and hearing children.

Cerebral lateralization in deaf and hearing 10-year-old children was investigated using a dichhaptic task. While the performance of the hearing children was generally consistent with the literature on hemispheric specialization, the deaf children's lateral asymmetry was reversed on the verbal task. The possibility of right-hemisphere involvement in reading in deaf children is advanced to account for this discrepancy. It is also suggested that spatial information may be more salient for both hemispheres and may serve as the basic unit of informational organization in deaf children.