 We find that models trained on structured data such as music and Java codehave internal representations that help in modelling human language, and that, surprisingly, adding minimal amounts of structure to the training data makes a large difference in transfer to natural language . Further experiments on transfer between human languages show that zero-shot performance on a test language is highly correlated with  syntactic similarity to the training language, even after removing any vocabulary overlap.
<meaning-changed>  We find that models trained on structured data such as music and Java codehave internal representations that help in modelling human language, and that, surprisingly, adding minimal amounts of structure to the training data makes a large difference in transfer to natural language . Further experiments on transfer between human languages show that zero-shot performance on a test language is highly correlated with  syntactic similarity to the training language, even after removing any vocabulary overlap.
 We find that training on non-linguistic data with latent structure (MIDI music or Java code) improves test performance on natural language, despite no overlap in surface form or vocabulary. Training on artificial languages containing recursion (hierarchical structure) also improves performance on natural language, again with no vocabulary overlap. Surprisingly, training on artificial languages consisting of sets of separated pairs of words, but with no recursion, improves performance on natural language as well as recursive languages do. Experiments on transfer between human languages show that zero-shot performance on a test language is highly correlated with syntactic similarity to the training language, even after removing any vocabulary overlap.