ABSTRACT
Evidence has accumulated in the literature on monolinguals suggesting that the standard pattern of cerebral lateralization is more characteristic of males than females. Similar evidence has been obtained in the bilingual literature as well, the potential contribution of the factor of gender differences in lateralization has been ignored. Familiar methodological issues arise in selecting word stimuli for laterality studies in monolinguals; the stimuli must be adequately screened in terms of word length, frequency, grammatical class, abstractness, imageability, and phonetic composition. In the case of studies of bilingual laterality, difficulties may arise in preparing comparable sets of stimuli from structurally different languages, especially regarding such dimensions as word length or phonetic composition. A number of studies employing proficient and nonproficient bilinguals have tended to confound the variable of proficiency with that of age of second-language acquisition. Whereas proficient bilinguals in these studies had typically acquired both languages during infancy, nonproficient bilinguals had begun second language acquisition during adolescence and/or in adulthood.
