48 | PART B. SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUM ANITIES ISSN: 2075-4124 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL of ACADEM IC RESEARCH Vol. 8. No. 5. September , 2016 CELEBRAL LATERALITY OF WOMEN SOCCER’S * Tevfik Cem Akalin 1 , Mustafa Gumus 1,* , Mehmet Goktepe 2 , Hakan Acar 1 , Erkut Tutkun 3 1 Bulent Ecevit University, School of Physical Education and Sport, Zonguldak, 2 Bartin University, School of Physical Education and Sport, Bartin, 3 Uludag University, Faculty of Sport Sciences, Bursa (TURKEY) *Corresponding author: mustgumus@gmail.com DOI: 10.7813/2075-4124.2016/8-5/B.8 Received: 15 Aug, 2016 Accepted: 20 Sept, 2016 ABSTRACT Our study is made on 39 sportswomen, who attended to The Intercollegiate Women Turkey Football Championship, aiming at determining and examining the relation of the preference of hand, foot, eye and ear that give key hints about the functional asymmetry of the brain. In determining the preferences devoted to laterality, the preference of hand range is fixed with the Oldfield questionnaire and evaluated with regard to the Geschwind score. Some questions are asked to the subjects in the questionnaires in order to evaluate the range of preferences about foot, eye, and ear. The questionnaires consist of 4 questions while determining the foot preference range, 5 questions about the preference of the eye while the activity can be done with one of them and again 5 questions about the ear while the activity can be done with one of them. The data derived is saved on SPSS for Windows 16.0 program, the descriptive data is shown with arithmetic average – standard deviation and percentages, in evaluating the relation between the preferences the correlation analysis is used and the results are evaluated in 95% confidence interval. As a result, in our study, it is determined that the woman soccer’s are predominantly right-handed in their all preferences and they dominantly use the left hemisphere. Although, the results of the study show parallelism with the literature, it can be said that some differing values can show branch differences in sportswoman groups. Key words: Cerebral Laterality, Women’s Soccer, Hand and Foot Preference, Eye and Ear Preference 1. INTRODUCTION Football is the most popular sport over the world, which is played by both men and women (Stolen et al. 2005; Capranica et al. 1992). It succeeds to be on the front burner every time and attracts more and more people day by day (Gurkan, 2000). Recently, women have also become mpre interested in football (Capranica et al. 1992; Ferah, 2000). Despite its widespread popularity, there have been few researches on physical and physiological features of footballers until today. Although there have been lots of studies especially on the tendency of footballers towards right-foot and left-foot usage for many years, they haven’t yielded clear results yet. Thus, laterality studies are necessary for football. Celebral Laterality is defined as anatomical and functional differentiation between right and left hemisphere of brain. Examination of hand, foot, eye and ear preferences is important for the evaluation of this anatomical and functional differentiation. (Tan, 1985; Gabbard, 1993). Right and left symmetrical compound functional activities which require usages of hand, foot, eye, hearing and chew have one lateral preference which is called as laterality paralysis. Hemispheric laterality paralysis is diagnosed with partialities such as handedness, footedness, sightedness and earedness (Nissan et al. 2004). Polemikos and Papaeliou, who made a research on the consistency of preference of foot, eye and ear at the same side of individuals having right hand and lacking right hand by using Lateral Preference Inventory of Coren, state that in spite of domination of right-side is observed in handedness, footedness, sightedness and earedness, lateral preference is not equal in these (Polemikos and Papaeliou 2000). There is a strong tendency of right-handedness in comparison to left-handedness and there is a weak tendency of right- earedness when compared with left-earedness. In comparison to the right-handed, the left-handed have meaningly more tendency to prefer the same foot, eye and ear. Although it is estimated that the number of the left-handed were higher than today in old times, the number of the right-handed has always been dominant (Khalfa et al.) 90% of people use right hands (Annett 1985; Tanridag 1994; Bourassa et al. 1996), 80% use right foot, 70% use right eye and 60% use right ear (Porac and Coren 1981; Carey et al. 2001; Dossey 2003). Augustyn and Peters found out that; 72% of the right-handed used right foot, 1,5% used left foot and 26,5% of them used both feet; 54,8% of the left-handed used left foot, 18,7% used right foot and 26,5% of them used both feet. Thus, it is clear that all of the right- handed don’t use right foot (Augustyn and Peters 1986). Most of the people have the preference of hand, foot, * This manuscript has been presented in 11th International Sports Sciences Congress, poster presentation in Antalya/Turkey, 10-12 November, 2010.