{"slug": "does-typological-distance-affect-cross-lingual-transfer", "title": "Does Typological Distance Affect Cross-lingual Transfer?", "summary": "Pengfei Ren's BabyLM 2026 paper finds that coarse near/far typological distance between a first language (L1) and second language (L2) does not produce a uniform, target-independent advantage for the near L1 when GPT-2 Small models are trained from scratch on English, Dutch, or Chinese with a fixed Qwen2.5 tokenizer and then continued on the L2 target. Across five seeds, NL→EN and ZH→EN showed nearly identical Transfer Increment for English, and for Dutch the near-L1 condition's larger Transfer Increment came mostly from zero-shot starting scores, with terminal scores differing by only 0.9 percentage points. Headroom-normalized Transfer Increment gave the same target-dependent picture, the paper reports in Proceedings of the Second BabyLM Workshop, pages 65–74, Budapest, Hungary.", "body_md": "##### Abstract\n\nThe 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.\n- Anthology ID:\n- 2026.babylm-main.6\n- Volume:\n- [Proceedings of the Second BabyLM Workshop](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2026.babylm-main/)\n- Month:\n- October\n- Year:\n- 2026\n- Address:\n- Budapest, Hungary\n- Editors:\n- [Leshem Choshen](https://aclanthology.org/people/leshem-choshen/) ,[Ryan Cotterell](https://aclanthology.org/people/ryan-cotterell/) ,[Mustafa Omer Gul](https://aclanthology.org/people/mustafa-omer-gul/) ,[Jaap Jumelet](https://aclanthology.org/people/jaap-jumelet/unverified/) ,[Tal Linzen](https://aclanthology.org/people/tal-linzen/) ,[Aaron Mueller](https://aclanthology.org/people/aaron-mueller/) ,[Suchir Salhan](https://aclanthology.org/people/suchir-salhan/) ,[Raj Sanjay Shah](https://aclanthology.org/people/raj-sanjay-shah/) ,[Alex Warstadt](https://aclanthology.org/people/alex-warstadt/) ,[Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox](https://aclanthology.org/people/ethan-wilcox/)\n- Venues:\n- [BabyLM](https://aclanthology.org/venues/babylm/) |[WS](https://aclanthology.org/venues/ws/)\n- SIG:\n- Publisher:\n- Association for Computational Linguistics\n- Note:\n- Pages:\n- 65–74\n- Language:\n- URL:\n- [https://aclanthology.org/2026.babylm-main.6/](https://aclanthology.org/2026.babylm-main.6/)\n- DOI:\n- Cite (ACL):\n- Pengfei Ren. 2026. [Does Typological Distance Affect Cross-lingual Transfer?](https://aclanthology.org/2026.babylm-main.6/) . In*Proceedings of the Second BabyLM Workshop* , pages 65–74, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.\n- Cite (Informal):\n- [Does Typological Distance Affect Cross-lingual Transfer?](https://aclanthology.org/2026.babylm-main.6/) (Ren, BabyLM 2026)\n- PDF:\n- [https://aclanthology.org/2026.babylm-main.6.pdf](https://aclanthology.org/2026.babylm-main.6.pdf)", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/does-typological-distance-affect-cross-lingual-transfer", "canonical_source": "https://aclanthology.org/2026.babylm-main.6/", "published_at": "2026-10-24 00:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-25 21:41:41.837966+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["natural-language-processing", "large-language-models", "ai-research", "machine-learning"], "entities": ["Pengfei Ren", "BabyLM Workshop", "Association for Computational Linguistics", "GPT-2 Small", "Qwen2.5"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/does-typological-distance-affect-cross-lingual-transfer", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/does-typological-distance-affect-cross-lingual-transfer.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/does-typological-distance-affect-cross-lingual-transfer.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/does-typological-distance-affect-cross-lingual-transfer.jsonld"}}