It is well known that different people have different aptitudes regarding various programming paradigms (e.g. some people have trouble learning non-procedural, especially functional languages. Some people have trouble understanding pointers - see Joel Spolsky's blog for musings on that. Some people have trouble grasping recursion).

I was recently reading about a study that looked at how the grammar of someone's native language affected their speed of learning math. Can't find that article now but a quick googling found this reference.

That led me to wondering whether someone's native culture or first language might affect their aptitude towards various programming paradigms. I'm more curious about positive influences - e.g. some trait that make it easier/faster for someone to learn a particular paradigm, for example native language grammar being very recursion-oriented.

To be clear, I'm looking for how culture/language grammare may affect the difference between aptitude of the same person towards various paradigms as opposed to how it affects overall aptitude towards programming between different persons.

Important: the only answers I'm interested in are either references to scientific studies, or personal observations from someone intimately familiar with a particular culture/language, including from their own experience.

E.g. I'm not interested in your opinion of how Chinese being your first language affects anything unless you speak Chinese or worked with extremely large set of Chinese-native programmers extensively.

I'm OK with your guesstimates not based on scientific studies, but please be sure to supply your reasoning about plausible causes of your observation.

I'm not interested in culture-bashing (any such commends will be deleted or flagged for deletion).

I'm also not particularly interested in culture-building - we all know Linus is from Finland and Tetris was written in Russia and Larry Wall is an American. Any culture/nation can produce a brilliant mind in any discipline. I'm interested in averages.