Differential cerebral speech lateralization in Crow Indian and Anglo children.

Sixty pairs of dichotically presented CV syllables were administered to matched samples of bilingual Native American Crow and monolingual Anglo subjects. While sex and grade were not significant factors, a significant variance was found between the performance of the bilingual Native American Crow and the monolingual Anglo subjects. As predicted (1) the bilingual children demonstrated a more symmetrical cerebral representation for language processing than the monolingual children; and (2) the bilingual primary Crow speakers had a greater right hemisphere involvement in receptive language processing than the monolingual English speakers. Possible factors influencing these results are discussed.