Does Typological Distance Affect Cross-lingual Transfer?

Abstract

The Contrastive-Analysis Hypothesis (CAH) proposes that similarities between a learner’s first language (L1) and second language (L2) can facilitate L2 learning, while differences can make it more difficult. We ask a related computational question: under a limited, developmentally motivated data budget, does a coarse near/far relation between L1 and L2 predict grammatical performance when a language model is trained first on L1 and then on L2? We train GPT-2 Small models from scratch on English, Dutch, or Chinese with a fixed Qwen2.5 tokenizer, and continue training them on the corresponding L2 targets. Across five seeds, we compare zero-shot starting scores, terminal L2 scores, Transfer Increment (TI; terminal minus zero-shot), and Transfer Benefit (TB; terminal minus a same-budget target-only baseline). For English, NL→EN and ZH→EN have nearly identical TI. For Dutch, the near-L1 condition has a larger TI, but most of this difference comes from the zero-shot starting scores, while the terminal scores differ by only 0.9 percentage points. Headroom-normalized TI gives the same target-dependent picture. Across the tested pairs, the near/far contrast therefore does not produce a uniform, target-independent advantage for the near L1.

- Anthology ID:
- 2026.babylm-main.6
- Volume:
- [Proceedings of the Second BabyLM Workshop](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2026.babylm-main/)
- Month:

• October
• Year:
• 2026
• Address:
• Budapest, Hungary
• Editors:
• Leshem Choshen ,Ryan Cotterell ,Mustafa Omer Gul ,Jaap Jumelet ,Tal Linzen ,Aaron Mueller ,Suchir Salhan ,Raj Sanjay Shah ,Alex Warstadt ,Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox

- Venues:
- [BabyLM](https://aclanthology.org/venues/babylm/) |[WS](https://aclanthology.org/venues/ws/)
- SIG:
- Publisher:

• Association for Computational Linguistics

- Note:
- Pages:

• 65–74

- Language:
- URL:
- [https://aclanthology.org/2026.babylm-main.6/](https://aclanthology.org/2026.babylm-main.6/)
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):

• Pengfei Ren. 2026. Does Typological Distance Affect Cross-lingual Transfer? . InProceedings of the Second BabyLM Workshop , pages 65–74, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.

- Cite (Informal):
- [Does Typological Distance Affect Cross-lingual Transfer?](https://aclanthology.org/2026.babylm-main.6/) (Ren, BabyLM 2026)
- PDF:
- [https://aclanthology.org/2026.babylm-main.6.pdf](https://aclanthology.org/2026.babylm-main.6.pdf)