Is Cross-Lingual Transfer in Bilingual Models Human-Like? A Study with Overlapping Word Forms in Dutch and English
Bilingual speakers show cross-lingual activation during reading, especially for words with shared surface form. Cognates (friends) typically lead to facilitation, whereas interlingual homographs (false friends) cause interference or no effect. We examine whether cross-lingual activation in bilingual language models mirrors these patterns. We train Dutch-English causal Transformers under four vocabulary-sharing conditions that manipulate whether (false) friends receive shared or language-specific embeddings. Using psycholinguistic stimuli from bilingual reading studies, we evaluate the models through surprisal and embedding similarity analyses. The models largely maintain language separati...
| Authors | Iza Škrjanec, Irene Elisabeth Winther, Vera Demberg et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 8 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 8 April 2026 |
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