A Study of Crosslinguistic Influence in Language Models
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
arXiv:2601.21587 (cs)
[Submitted on 29 Jan 2026 (v1), last revised 26 Jul 2026 (this version, v2)]
Title:A Study of Crosslinguistic Influence in Language Models
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Abstract:The sequential acquisition of languages inevitably leads to Crosslinguistic Influence (CLI), where the syntactic properties of a first language (L1) impact the processing of a second language (L2). While modern language models exhibit robust cross-lingual transfer, the exact mechanisms governing how language dominance, relative proficiency, and typological distance dictate structural interference warrant deeper investigation. In this work, we systematically investigate CLI in artificial learners by training simultaneous and sequential bilingual models across 15 typologically diverse L1s and varying the Step of Exposure (SoE), defined as the specific training step at which the L2 is introduced. Utilizing crosslinguistic structural priming, we decouple latent CLI into distinct positive and negative transfer rates. Our evaluations reveal a critical computational tradeoff: while increased L1 dominance (higher SoE) strongly amplifies the correlation between structural transfer and syntactic distance, diminished L2 proficiency bottlenecks the model's capacity for positive transfer, leaving it highly vulnerable to persistent negative interference from distant L1s. Mechanistically, we demonstrate that L1 typological proximity physically dictates the cross-lingual overlap of L2 syntactic neurons. Furthermore, we uncover that explicit priming induces a dynamic layer-wise migration of grammatical resolution to the terminal layers of the network. Through targeted causal ablations, we confirm that deep-layer attention mechanisms exclusively drive this crosslinguistic transfer by routing the L1 structural prior into the final prediction. Ultimately, our findings demonstrate that CLI in language models is not an arbitrary artifact of capacity constraints, but a structured phenomenon fundamentally governed by the interplay of language dominance and proficiency.
| Comments: | Under review |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2601.21587 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2601.21587v2 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2601.21587
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
|
Submission history
From: Abderrahmane Issam [view email][v1] Thu, 29 Jan 2026 11:53:48 UTC (6,985 KB)
[v2] Sun, 26 Jul 2026 13:47:55 UTC (19,464 KB)
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