406 26 The Role of Cognitive Aptitudes in a Study Abroad Language- Learning Environment Medha Tare, Ewa Golonka, Alia K. Lancaster, Carrie Bonilla, Catherine J. Doughty, R. Kirk Belnap, and Scott R. Jackson Introduction Study abroad is an important training context for language learning and has been considered crucial for reaching advanced levels of language knowledge (Freed, 1995). Studies have shown superior performance by students who studied abroad compared to those who only studied at home across different skills and abilities (Llanes, 2011). Greater increases for participants who studied abroad have been shown in several studies for foreign language oral fuency (Freed, 1995; Segalowitz & Freed, 2004) as well as vocabulary (Dewey, 2008; Foster, 2009). Many factors have been implicated in students’ language-learning success during study abroad, with profciency gains found to be heavily dependent on time in country (Davidson, 2010; Larson-Hall & Dewey, 2012) and other noncognitive predictors, including gender, age, starting pro- fciency, and knowledge of other foreign languages (Brecht, Davidson, & Ginsberg, 1993; Davidson, 2010). Aptitudes, defned as individual di fferences in learners’ stable cognitive abilities, may also relate to the effectiveness of a study abroad experience; however, the research on the role of aptitudes (Llanes, 2011) is inconclusive, and what has been conducted is limited by the sample size and breadth of aptitude constructs that were investigated. In this study, we examine the relationships between oral profciency gains during study abroad and a wide range of aptitude constructs, as measured by the High-Level Language Aptitude Battery (Hi-LAB) of 10 cognitive measures. Previous Literature One area of interest in the study abroad literature is the role of individual differences in cognitive aptitude in determining students’ success in language learning. This lit- erature suggests that there is a relationship between learners’ cognitive aptitudes and linguistic gains in the study abroad context, though the results thus far are mixed. A group of predictor studies used aptitude, as measured by the Modern Language Aptitude Test (MLAT; Carroll & Sapon, 1959), in an effort to identify factors affecting