The impact of (written) language on physical education has hardly been subject to investigation so far. However, similar to other school subjects it seems important to know if and how students understand e.g. written assignments of tasks or feedback charts in physical education. In the underlying explorative study 1346 students (grades 7 and 8) were questioned with regard to their knowledge, perfomance and linguistic ability in physical education. Furthermore, it was investigated inhowfar students‘ knowledge is dependant on the linguistic difficulty of test items. Results show that linguistic ability does have an impact on performance in physical education. However, the variation of linguistic difficulty in easy, medium and hard does not accordingly reduce solution probablilty