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Causal Interventions Reveal Typologically Organized Syntactic Mechanisms in Multilingual Language Models

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Aug 28, 2026 · UTC

Linguistic theory has long recognized cross-linguistic syntactic regularities, leading to claims that these similar structures are processed by similar mechanisms. However, this hypothesis has been difficult to test empirically due to our lack of fine-grained, manipulable access of human processing mechanisms. In this work, we take advantage of techniques from mechanistic interpretability to study such a question in multilingual LMs. We first isolate language-internal mechanisms before attempting to transfer them cross-lingually. Across four models and three well-studied constructions (subject

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First collected: 2026-09-21T08:02:06.831Z. This is not the publication date.