On the Acquisition of Shared Grammatical Representations in Bilingual
  Language Models
Authors: name: Catherine Arnett; name: Tyler A. Chang; name: James A. Michaelov; name: Benjamin K. Bergen
Published: 2025-03-05 23:27:58

Abstract: While crosslingual transfer is crucial to contemporary language models'
multilingual capabilities, how it occurs is not well understood. In this paper,
we ask what happens to a monolingual language model when it begins to be
trained on a second language. Specifically, we train small bilingual models for
which we control the amount of data for each language and the order of language
exposure. To find evidence of shared multilingual representations, we turn to
structural priming, a method used to study grammatical representations in
humans. We first replicate previous crosslingual structural priming results and
find that after controlling for training data quantity and language exposure,
there are asymmetrical effects across language pairs and directions. We argue
that this asymmetry may shape hypotheses about human structural priming
effects. We also find that structural priming effects are less robust for less
similar language pairs, highlighting potential limitations of crosslingual
transfer learning and shared representations for typologically diverse
languages.