Link: www.liamgarside.com/Espanol-Riop...

👩‍🔬 This is the first of several studies run together with Mercedes Martínez Bruera, Daniel Weingärtner, Esther Rinke & @sollago.bsky.social from
@goetheuni.bsky.social, Andrea Listanti
@unicologne.bsky.social, Carlos Álvarez & Horacio Barber @ull.es as part of the EVOLVE project

💡 So not all heritage speakers display “accelerated” language change.
Innovation may depend on sociolinguistic factors (e.g., access to formal education, frequency of use) and on the grammatical domain tested.

Their judgments depended on how often they used Spanish and which language they preferred (Spanish vs. German).

✅Heritage speakers patterned with European monolinguals, not Rioplatense ones.
They showed robust knowledge of clitics but no evidence of innovative behavior with accusative doubling.

If heritage speakers mirrored diachronic change, we would expect them to pattern like 🇦🇷speakers — who accept accusative clitic doubling (e.g., “La vio a María”).

But if they behaved conservatively, they should pattern like European speakers — who reject such structures.

In our study we compared:
🇪🇸 Monolingual speakers of European Spanish
🇦🇷 Monolingual speakers of Rioplatense Spanish
🇩🇪 Heritage speakers of European Spanish living in Germany
We focused on accusative clitic doubling, a phenomenon that’s grammatical in🇦🇷 but not in 🇪🇸 Spanish.

Recent theories suggest that heritage grammars can act as "windows into language change". Since heritage speakers grow up with less consistent input and fewer formal learning opportunities, they may regularize variable structures, moving faster along a diachronic path.

But first, what are heritage speakers? Put it simply: Spanish speakers move to a country where Spanish is not spoken, have a baby and raise her in Spanish.
Ta-Da! 👶🇪🇸Heritage Spanish speaker.

Great collaborative work together with
Lucas Sterpin, Camilo Avendaño, Jeremías Inchauspe, Gonzalo Pérez, Franco Ferrante, Agustina Birba, Lorena Abusamra, Bárbara Sampedro, Valeria Abusamra, Lucía Amoruso & Adolfo M. García.
Full study here:
👉 doi.org/10.1080/1385...

Why does it matter?
🧠 Episodic memory issues are common in HIV and affect daily life.
💻 Our approach provides a scalable, cost-effective, and objective tool—ideal for clinical screenings, especially in underserved regions. (+)

Results: Compared to controls, people with HIV…
🔹 Produced fewer nouns
🔹 Had poorer semantic similarity to the original story
🔹 Showed less organized discourse
Using these digital features, machine learning models could reliably distinguish people with HIV from controls. (+)

We recruited 92 Spanish speakers (50 with HIV, 42 controls).
Participants listened to a short story and retold it.
We analyzed the retellings using NLP to capture:
Verbosity (word use)
Semantic acuity (meaning similarity)
Organizational structure (discourse coherence) (+)

Standard memory tests for HIV often rely on simple counts of recalled items—limited, subjective, and hard to scale.
We developed an automated NLP approach to analyze how people retell stories. (+)

El "espanplaining" es mi situación favorita. Me ha pasado que revisores hablantes de español no nativos confesos me sugirieran revisar mi objeto de estudio porque en español peninsular no era admisible ¿?

🤣