Responding to your question, an interesting point was made by Prof. Stanley Coren in Canada, who writes in “The Left-Hander Syndrome” that the training question (relative to the reversal of a child’s dominant handedness) can play out in two ways. In both cases, there is a linkage to the question of the dominant foot that you may find interesting.

First, based on environmental cues, a personal preference to adapt to the majority behavior of right-handed peers can create pressures on the left-handed child to reverse their handedness in order to fit in.

A second learning process can occur due to the deliberate application of training forces by adults that force the child to reverse their handedness to match the adult’s preferences for the child’s expression of handedness. In both cases the learn by doing method is at work.

When a child’s dominant handedness has been reversed, I refer to that individual as a Submergee as a way of expressing the fact that their innate handedness has been reversed by this process. The same term applies to both left-handed and right-handed individuals whose handedness has been reversed.

Retraining pressures on handedness, whether they are applied by observation or by adults, are typically directed at the most visible manifestations of handedness, such as altering the hand used for eating and handwriting, use of toothbrush, throwing etc.

Because the reversal training (learning by doing) is typically focused on the hand, innate footedness of the Submergee is usually left intact. In the case of a left-handed person who has become a right-handed Submergee, they will normally remain left-footed, assuming that their innate laterality prior to the reversal was dominant on the left side for both limbs.

When interviewing a potential Submergee candidate to see if they might have this history, a good question to ask is which leg is placed into their clothes first when dressing. This can be a good clue to consider since this movement of the feet is normally excluded from the focus of the Submergee training process.

In my experience, a majority of left-handers are left-footed and most right-handers are right-footed, which accords with published research.

Prof. Chris McManus in the U.K. makes the point that there is a sub-category of laterality expression which he refers to as “Indeterminate Handedness”. This category provides a means of dealing with the fact that uniform laterality isn’t present in all individuals when looking at patterns of laterality for a range of tasks including throwing, writing, utensil use and the laterality of the dominant foot and eye. See the book “Right Hand Left Hand” by McManus for more, or if you are interested in handedness reversals, see my book “Hidden Handedness” at Amazon.com.

Samuel