This study addressed the left hemisphere deficiency hypothesis, associated with reading disability, by accounting for attention and examining the relationship between dichotic listening results and neuropsychological deficits. Twenty reading-disabled (RD) and 20 non-reading-disabled (NRD) boys, aged 8-12, were administered the Verbal Dichotic Listening Task, the Non Verbal Dichotic Listening Task, the Lindamood Auditory Conceptual Test (LAC), and the Luria Nebraska Neuropsychological Battery-Childrens Revision (LNNB-CR). Results showed that RD children performed significantly more poorly than NRD children on: tests designed to measure overall "neurological involvement"; scales believed to tap predominantly left hemispheric processes, including the LNNB-CR Writing, Expressive Language, and Reading scales; the LAC, a test of phonemic segmentation; and the Left Sensorimotor scale, a scale which presumably taps left hemispheric sensory and motor functions. RD children performed equivalently to NRD children on the right hemispheric Visual scale. While RD children exhibited a similar left ear advantage for dichotic words as NRD children, they performed more poorly with both left and right ears. These data suggest that RD boys have problems with specific, predominantly left hemisphere-controlled functions, some of which are critical to reading. (JDD)