FACTOR-ANALYSES OF HANDEDNESS ITEMS IN LEFT AND RIGHT-HANDED INTELLECTUALLY GIFTED AND NONGIFTED CHILDREN

Handedness questionnaire items from the General Scale of the Lateral P reference Schedule (Dean, 1988) were administered to 423 intellectuall y gifted and 226 nongifted children to investigate the underlying proc esses that contribute to laterality. Handedness items were factor anal yzed using principal components (PC) analysis with varimax rotation. P C analyses computed separately for gifted and nongifted left and right -handed writers yielded very different factor structures. Left-handers (regardless of gifted status) tended to have factor structures marked by items that loaded saliently on more than one factor. Whereas;a fou r factor solution best fit the data for the nongifted left-handers, a three factor solution was the best fit for the gifted left-handed chil dren. The factor structure for the left-handed gifted children was mar ked by two factors where the item ''draw'' was the only item to load b oth positively and saliently, a pattern not evident among the nongifte d left-handers. These results suggested different underlying patterns contributing to laterality among these groups of children.