Feeding BabyLMs Macaroni: Code-Switching Curricula Cause Cross-Lingual Convergence
Children in multilingual communities often code-switch, using multiple languages in a single utterance. Can we induce cross-lingual alignment in language models by training on code-switched text? We pretrain small decoder-only transformers on two 100M-word multilingual corpora: a base corpus formed by mixing the English, Dutch, and Chinese BabyBabelLM datasets, and a corpus generated from it by inserting word- and sentence-level code-switching using an LLM. We find that training on code-switched data aligns the representations of parallel text, particularly across different scripts, and that this alignment persists through training on monolingual documents. Under a learning curriculum tha...
| Authors | Dries Rooryck, Alex Cai, Yonatan Belinkov et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 24 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 24 September 2026 |
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