A Clinical Study of a Severe Case of Reading Disability in a Left-Handed Child

The definite interest sliown recently in problems of handedness and particularly in those of the relationship, now generally accepted, between handedness and "eyedness" has motivated a further interest at the Psychological Clinic of the University of Pennsylvania m the orthogenic procedure that seems best adapted for those individuals whose disability in reading seemed etiologically to rest within the sphere of these problems. Studies by Orton1 and Monroe2 would indicate that there is a basis for the assumption that tendencies to mirror writing and reading in reverse fashion, i.e., from right to left, correlate to a definite extent with handedness. These tendencies are more evident in left-handed than they are in right-handed individuals, and their incidence seems greatest in those cases where dominance of either right or left is not clear cut, particularly the type of child who has been "trained over" to the use of the right hand after a preference has been shown for the use of the left. A study3 of the problem by Lord, Carmichael, and Dearborn in 1925 suggested that the left-handed child who habitually relies upon kinaestlietic cues in learning to read might very possibly encounter difficulty when expected, as he is in the public schools, to conform to the dextrad pattern which holds throughout m a civilization composed largely of right-handed individuals. Dearborn asserts in a more recent paper4