The development of hemispheric specialization of letter matching

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Abstract
To investigate the normal development of hemispheric specialization for letter matching in children who begin to read, 80 children from kindergarten, first, and second grade were asked to find a centrally presented letter in a three‐letter word vertically presented on the left or right of fixation in a tachistoscope. Analyses of variance (ANOVAs) were conducted on median reaction times and accuracy. Different visual field (hemisphere) effects were obtained on reaction time and accuracy. Correlations between the effects obtained in the previous analyses and individual differences in exposure time, hand speed, and vocabulary development suggested that each dependent variable measures a different skill and that kindergartners approached the visual field task as a linguistic task and second graders approached it as a speeded task. These findings are discussed in relation to models of the development of hemispheric specialization.