# Does Typological Distance Affect Cross-lingual Transfer?

> Source: <https://aclanthology.org/2026.babylm-main.6/>
> Published: 2026-10-24 00:00:00+00:00

##### 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](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/)
- 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?](https://aclanthology.org/2026.babylm-main.6/) . In*Proceedings 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)