Cerebral asymmetry in congenitally deaf subjects.

Congenitally deaf subjects exposed to tachistoscopic presentation of English words, British Sign Language (BSL) signs, manual letters stimuli and a non-verbal task showed a left hemisphere advantage for English words and signs, a right hemisphere advantage for manual letters and no field differences for the non-verbal task.

Visual Field asymmetries for verbal and dot localization tasks in monolingual and bilingual subjects.

Visual Field asymmetries for verbal and dot localization tasks were examined in monolingual and bilingual subjects. Consistent right-visual-field advantages were found for verbal material in all groups, although bilingual subjects showed a reduced laterality for their second language in comparison with their native language. Monolingual subjects displayed left-visual-field advantages on the dot localization task, but no consistent asymmetries were shown by the bilingual subjects. The overall pattern of results is consistent with left-hemisphere involvement for the processing of verbal material, but the heterogeneity of performance on the dot localization task suggests that processing of such a task may be influenced by subjects' linguistic backgrounds.