Relating Natural Language Aptitude to Individual Differences in Learning Programming Languages | Scientific Reports
The research described herein is motivated by a conceptual paradigm shift, namely, that learning to use modern programming languages resembles learning a natural language, such as French or Chinese, in adulthood. Specifically, we argue that research on the neurocognitive bases of programming aptitude has largely missed the fact that computer programming languages are designed to resemble the communication structure of the programmer (human languages), an idea that was first formalized by Chomsky over 50 years ago9. Although this idea has been revisited in recent reviews10,11, only a small number of studies have investigated the predictive utility of linguistic skill for learning programming languages3,12,13.