Left‐ and right‐handed children's drawing performance: Is there any difference?

Abstract

The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of hand preference on children's drawing development. An equal number of left- and right-handed children (N = 182), aged 7 to 12 years were asked to complete four different drawing tasks. During the drawing process, directionality of horizontal, vertical, and circular strokes as well as sequencing was recorded. Each drawing was scored according to the developmental stage to which is corresponded. It was found that drawing performance improved with age, irrespectively of hand preference and sex. In other words, left- and right-handers' drawing performance across the four tasks was not found to differ significantly. The only consistent difference between the two groups involved was in the production of horizontal lines. The results are discussed in terms of implications for questions about the lack of differences in left- and right-handed children's drawing performance.

Handedness, Health and Cognitive Development: Evidence from Children in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth

“…(2003) also found that laterality is only weakly associated with children's cognitive ability. Vlachos and Bonoti (2004) found no significant differences in performance across four drawing‐related tasks by handedness, although the study used only a sample of 182 children aged between 7 and 12 years.…”

No Association between Music Ability and Hand Preference in Children

“…The EHI is a well-known instrument used to determine hand preference for specific tasks within a variety of research conditions (Bishop et al, 1996). The Citation Index indicates that it has been the most widely used inventory in the literature (Vlachos & Bonoti, 2004). The EHI has been standardized on several populations (McMeekan & Lishman, 1975;Williams, 1986) and administered to children (Bishop, 2006;Brito, Lins, Paumgartten, & Brito, 1992;Dane & Gümüstekin, 2002;Ostatníková, Laznibatová, Putz, Maťašeje, Dohnányiová, & Pastor, 2000;Ross, Lipper, & Auld, 1992).…”

Drawing and Handedness of Preschoolers: A Repeated-Measurement Approach to Hand Preference

“…Some did not find differences regarding the measured performances, e.g., nonverbal intelligence, reading, and spelling (Mayringer & Wimmer, 2002), reading skills and intelligence (McManus, Sik, Cole, Mellon, Wong, & Kloss, 1988), drawing skills (Vlachos & Bonoti, 2004b), and writing performance (Vlachos & Bonofi, 2004a). Others pointed to differences between left-and right-handed children (depending on their hand preference across different tasks), i.e,, overrepresentation of left-handed children in the group of poor writers (Vlachos & Bonoti, 2004a) and poorer drawing performance of left-handed children (Karapetsas & Vlachos, 1997), Tan (1985) found that children lacking clear hand preference showed worse gross and fine motor performance, Karapetsas and Vlachos (1997) postulated difterences in brain development, in particular regarding the myelinisation of the corpus callosum and the lateralization of the brain, as possible reasons why children with right hand preference and girls showed better performances in certain periods of development, Crow, Crow, Done, and Leask (1998) assessed relative hand skill and referred to the point of equal hand skill as a point of "hemispheric indecision" (p. 1277).…”