RESEARCH TOPIC AND RATIONALE From a European perspective, Flanders has a strong tradition in instructing Latin and Ancient Greek (Vereeck 2020). On the other hand, classical language (CL) education is subject to a fierce public debate (Vereeck under review). Inspired by utilitarianism, the main argument against the study of CLs is that they are useless and irrelevant in today’s world. An often-heard counterargument is that studying CLs supposedly enhances language ability, reasoning skills, independent judgement, and so on. Thus it would appear that besides the primary objectives of imparting the Latin and Ancient Greek languages, literatures and their broader cultural-historical context, CL education has a set of secondary objectives: generating linguistic as well as general-cognitive transfer (Barnett and Ceci 2002). But does the study of CLs really transfer to other cognitive domains? It is a fact that (former) CL pupils tend to outperform their peers on a variety of measures, from standardised language tests, over medical entrance exams, to achievement in higher education (Bracke and Bradshaw 2020). However, it is still unclear whether this is due to a transfer effect from studying CLs or to preselectivity, i.e. to higher a priori cognitive ability. Despite their ubiquitous presence and the great number of pupils they attract, the actual cognitive impact of Flemish CL programmes has never been studied across time before. Against the backdrop of growing STEM advertisement and continuous international debate about CL education, it is high time to evaluate this traditional study option and put the alleged cognitive transfer to the test. MY EMPIRICAL STUDY For the first time, I am applying successful psycholinguistic research paradigms to CL learning. I am currently conducting a longitudinal observational study in secondary schools, with a matched comparison group design. This quasi-experimental design allows to isolate the effect of CL education and rule out the influence of preselectivity on the collected ...