French immersion and hemispheric language processing: A dual-task study.

32 right-handed high school boys in early or late French immersion programs and 16 nonimmersion, unilingual high school boys performed verbal tasks (reading aloud and identifying pictures) in English and French while finger-tapping with the index finger of their left or right hand. Disruption scores were calculated and used to infer contralateral hemispheric involvement. All Ss showed significantly greater disruption with right-hand tapping, indicating high levels of left hemisphere involvement. Results confirm that early and late bilinguals do not differ from each other or from unilinguals in the hemispheric processing of language. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)