This study used cued dichotic listening to investigate differences in language lateralization among right-handed (control), left handed, bilingual, and learning disabled children. Subjects (N=60) ranging in age from 7-13 years were administered a consonant-vowel-consonant dichotic paradigm with three experimental conditions (free recall, directed left, directed right). A three-factor analysis of variance design revealed that control, bilingual, and learning disabled children produced the expected right-ear advantage (REA) suggestive of left hemisphere dominance for language processing whereas left-handed children produced a left ear advantage suggestive of right hemisphere superiority for language processing. The cued attention data derived from groups as well as from individual subjects suggested that in comparison to control children, left-handed children were greatly susceptible to attentional shifting similar to learning-disabled children but in the opposite hemisphere. Bilingual children were found not to be as strongly lateralized as controls but possibly less susceptible to attentional manipulation. Further lambda analyses conducted on individual subjects indicated that the magnitude and degree of perceptual asymmetry varied widely among some individuals of various anomaly groups. These findings lend support to the hypothesis that attentional factors have a greater influence on asymmetrical functioning for some anomalous groups of children (i.e., left-handers and learning-disabled) while not affecting others (i.e., controls and bilinguals). (Author)