Lateralized interference in concurrent manual activity: influence of age in children

Thirty-six right-handed bilingual children equally drawn from the two age groups of seven to nine, and eleven to thirteen years, concurrently performed a sequential finger tapping task while: (a) sitting quiet (b) reading aloud, and (c) reading aloud with an instructions to read carefully. The results showed that reading interfered more with right- than with left-hand tapping, but only in older children. The careful reading condition, however, did not add any further manual interference. The data suggest that differential right-hand tapping disruption varies with age and/or with the amount of exposure to a language or languages. These results are discussed in terms of variant and invariant cerebral asymmetry of function during childhood.