Abstract
Language aptitude has recently regained interest in cognitive neuroscience. Traditional language aptitude testing included phonemic coding ability, associative memory, grammatical sensitivity and inductive language learning. Moreover, domain-general cognitive abilities are associated with individual differences in language aptitude, together with factors that have yet to be elucidated. Beyond domain-general cognition, it is also likely that aptitude and experience in domain-specific but non-linguistic fields (e.g. music or numerical processing) influence and are influenced by language aptitude. We investigated some of these relationships in a sample of 152 participants, using exploratory graph analysis, across different levels of regularisation, i.e. sensitivity. We carried out a meta cluster analysis in a second step to identify variables that are robustly grouped together. We discuss the data, as well as their meta-network groupings, at a baseline network sensitivity level, and in two analyses, one including and the other excluding dyslexic readers. Our results show a stable association between language and cognition, and the isolation of multilingual language experience, musicality and literacy. We highlight the necessity of a more comprehensive view of language and of cognition as multivariate systems.
The paper is open access and can be read in full here: doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2024.149109
About Assoz. Prof. Narly Golestani, BSc PhD
Narly Golestani is Associate Professor at the Vienna Cognitive Science Hub and at the Department of Behavioral and Cognitive Biology at the Faculty of Life Sciences. She heads the Brain and Language Lab at the Vienna Cognitive Science Hub of the University of Vienna, Austria, and at the Department of Psychology at the University of Geneva, Switzerland.
