The Relationship Between Language Aptitude and Coding: Is English Proficiency Necessary?

The study aimed to investigate the relationship between natural language aptitude and coding, specifically focusing on whether this relationship is tied to English proficiency or language proficiency more generally. The study included over 100 participants, half of whom were Chinese English bilinguals and the other half were English monolingual speakers. The results showed that in Chinese English bilinguals, their Chinese proficiency was a stronger predictor of their ability to produce code, while English skills were more important for debugging. Overall, the study found that knowing languages in general provides a significant advantage in learning programming languages, and it is not necessary for the language known and the coding language to be perfectly matched.