WHY LEFT-HANDED PEOPLE ARE SELDOM GOOD TALKERS.

King Country Chronicle, Volume VIII, Issue 717, 31 October 1914, Page 3

WHY LEFT-HANDED PEOPLE ARE SELDOM GOOD TALKERS.

Everyone knows how extremely difficult it is to "break" a child or a grown person of the so-called habit of being left-handed. After experiments and systematic attempts that have covered moro than twenty years, made by experts in the study and training of children, the result has led to the belief that the reason left-handed people nre riot good talkers is because the power of the hands is intimately associated with the unfolding of thc» language sense, and that the cerebral centres which regulate language are located on the left side. In other words, that part of your brain which controls your speaking ability is in the left side of your head, in relation to the centres which regulate the control of your right arm and hand.. And so, if this decision, made after a score of years of study, is quite correct, mosf of us have been wrong all these years in the belief that a child becomes left-handed solely through accident or because it was allowed to use its left hand too much. Some are even so superstitious as to believe that if the first thing put in a baby's hand is put in the left hand, the child will become left-handed, and vice versa. But now it seems that left or right handedness is really due to the development of the right or left side of the brain. Thousands of human skeletons were carefully examined, and this demonstrated -that in all cases where the right arm is better developed than the left there is evidence of a correspond".gly increased development of the leftside of the brain. This is really not as complicated as • ' seems. If the left side of your brain is "better developed, your right arm will be better developed. If the right side of your brain is stronger, your left arm will be stronger. It seems that it is the development of either one or the other sides of your, brain that regulates the strength of your arm. Now, it happens, as mentioned above, that speech is controlled in a section of the brain just on the left side. The result is logically that if your brain is better developed on the right side, your ability to talk eloquently, to make speeches, and carry on brilliant conversation is not as great as io would foe if the left side of the brain were stronger. You are also inclined to be left-handed with a stronger section of the brain on the right side. Consequently, left-handed people era. not good speech-makers and talkers. Tt follows that . left-handed people must have less linguistic abilities than the right-handed, and that children obliged to use both hands equally will have a diminished power of ready speech and less ability in learning and remembering languages. This is believed to be the first argument against teaching-children to be ambidextrous, or capable of using either hand or arm alike.