This text is a practical guide for primary-care doctors and health visitors involved in the detection of developmental problems in children whose parents are worried that their child is not developing like other children. It will be of assistance to paediatricians and paediatric neurologists in providing a developmental perspective in the diagnostic process in their work with children with chronic neurological disorders. The tests described have been standardized by the author and cover the essentials of developmental examination: history - including parents' views of their child's development; clinical tests of hearing; examination of visual behavior and visual acuity; observation of developing motor skills; language/performance profiles in which any substantial unevenness or an overall low score may reveal a developmental problem. In practice the range of average ability is wide, so a distinctive feature of this book is a standardized data base in graphical form that can be used to identify readily those children (lowest 20%) who warrant further specialist investigation or treatment.

This book offers a comprehensive and readable account of theoretical aspects of the origins of normal development of handedness and its relationship to cerebral lateralization and intellectual function. Later chapters review the evidence for links between non-right-handedness and various developmental disorders: mental impairment, autism, epilepsy, and disorders of spoken and written langauge. The emphasis is on understanding the range of underlying mechanisms that might lead to associations between handedness and disorder, and on identifying assessment procedures that can distinguish between different explanations.