What makes a word hard to learn? Modeling L1 influence on English vocabulary difficulty
What makes a word difficult to learn, and how does the difficulty depend on the learner's native language? We computationally model vocabulary difficulty for English learners whose first language is Spanish, German, or Chinese with gradient-boosted models trained on features related to a word's familiarity (e.g., frequency), meaning, surface form, and cross-linguistic transfer. Using Shapley values, we determine the importance of each feature group. Word familiarity is the dominant feature group shared by all three languages. However, predictions for Spanish- and German-speaking learners rely additionally on orthographic transfer. This transfer mechanism is unavailable to Chinese learners...
| Authors | Jonas Mayer Martins, Zhuojing Huang, Aaricia Herygers et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 12 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 12 May 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.