The Score Is Not the Structure: Brain Alignment and Cross-Lingual Transfer
Similarity scores are often offered as evidence that a model shares structure with the brain or across languages. We ask what such a score reads when that structure is removed, or when the instrument measuring it does not work, in two settings. Across seventeen languages, a grammaticality probe transfers worse between more distant languages (r = -0.66). But the probe's own accuracy falls along the same axis and is at chance in four languages, four of the five most distant. Dropping them halves the explained variance, and because it also narrows the range of distances, the design cannot say how much of the gradient is the instrument. Counting the 272 language pairs as independent gives p =...
| Authors | Saman Rahbar |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 2 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 October 2026 |
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