HAND PERFORMANCE OF FRENCH CHILDREN ON A FINGER-TAPPING TEST IN RELATION TO HANDEDNESS, SEX, AND AGE

Hand performance and laterality scores on a unimanual tapping test wer e studied in relation to age, sex, and handedness in a sample of 209 F rench children. Each child performed three trials with each hand. Olde r children were faster, but differences between hands were not related to age. Right-handed girls were more lateralized than right-handed bo ys. Left- and right-handers could be differentiated more clearly by ta pping speed than by variability of tapping. A subsample of 36 right-ha nders were retested to estimate reliability. The coefficients were hig h, especially when using the mean of trials as the dependent variable. Correlations between performance on the tapping task and another test of hand-efficiency (dot-filling task) were low.