Study of the Handedness of an Ambidextrous Person from the Handwriting Samples

Abstract

Handwriting is a motor skill which becomes unique to a matured writer. The newlineunique features help in identification of common authors by analysing their newlinehandwriting samples. For handwriting identification, many handwriting features newlineare assessed. However, demographic features like handedness can be a great aid in newlinecertain cases if one can assess the same from handwriting. A writer could be right- newlinehanded, left-handed or ambidextrous depending upon the hand preference to write. newlineHand preference in handwriting examination can be encountered in various cases newlinelike forgery, disguise, signature frauds etc. The right-handed percentage in a newlinepopulation is more than 90%, left-handed is around 10% and ambidextrous group newlineis even rare with less than 1% in a population. Most of the studies have focused newlinethe features of right-handed writers and left-handed writers. However, newlineambidextrous writers are equally important. The current study has studied the newlinehandwriting of ambidextrous writers comprehensively with the main objective to newlinefind any significant differences between the handwriting from the left and right newlinehand of writers. To test the hypothesis, the statistical tests T test and Wilconxon newlinesign ranked tests were performed using SPSS. The test results showed that most of newlinethe parameters are not significantly different in the left and right hand of newlineambidextrous writers such as alignment, slant, size of letters, letter proportion, newlinespacing, reversals, and connections. However, the parameters like t crossing, newlinexi newlinedirection of movement of character O showed significant results in the newlinehandwriting of left and right hand of ambidextrous writers. The handwriting of newlineambidextrous writers were also compared with the normal right and left-handed newlinewriters. Apart from that, an attempt has been made to maintain a database for the newlineambidextrous writers as there is no database of ambidextrous writers.