Carolina Gattei

Hermoso proyecto de extensión y divulgación que se desarrollará en la Universidad de Torino (Italia), a cargo de dos colegas geniales.
También estaremos conversando sobre muchas de las cosas que investigamos en el @multilingualgender.bsky.social
¡Se agradece difusión!

👩‍🔬 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.

a baby is sitting on a bed holding a blue maraca and smiling . ALT: a baby is sitting on a bed holding a blue maraca and smiling .

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.

📣 New paper out!
We just published “Heritage Grammars and Language Change: the Case of Clitic Doubling in Spanish” in the Heritage Language Journal
@degruyterbrill.bsky.social
.
👉 doi.org/10.1163/1550...
This study asks: Do heritage speakers reflect ongoing processes of language change?

Digital language measures capture episodic memory disruptions in people with human immunodeficiency virus: A machine learning study Objective: Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) often affects episodic memory. Yet, standard measures of this domain are derived from clinicians’ simple counts of recalled and omitted pieces of infor...

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. (+)

🧵 New paper alert! How can language reveal hidden memory problems in people living with HIV?
Our new study published at @theclinicalnp.bsky.social
shows that digital speech measures + machine learning can detect subtle episodic memory disruptions. (+)

¡Tenemos una Doctora en Lingüística más en el grupo! ¡¡Felicitaciones, Analí Taboh!!
🎓✨ Un enorme orgullo haber acompañado tu recorrido junto a Diego Shalom. Gracias por tu entrega, tu compromiso y tu mirada crítica y rigurosa. ¡Un placer verte llegar tan alto! 👏💙

I'm offering a 3-year PhD position with benefits (1-year extension possible). Research topic open but broadly in incremental sentence comprehension. If you're into eye-tracking, even better! No teaching until Summer 2027, light teaching after that (English). Official ad soon. Please share 🙏

Special Issue Gender in Romance languages

Extension of the deadline for receiving submissions until August 25, 2025.
Extensión del plazo para recepción de envíos hasta el 25 de agosto de 2025.

Más información/More information: septentrio.uit.no/index.php/bo...

Situación de CyT en Argentina; 4 partes*.
¡Toda difusión nacional e internacional, nos ayuda!

The situation of science and technology in Argentina.
Any national and international RB/RT helps!

*Subo el video en partes porque excede la extensión máxima admitida en Bluesky.

¡Tenemos nueva Lic. en el grupo! Felicitaciones a Matilde Calmejane, quien hoy defendió su tesis sobre producción de oraciones interrogativas y relativas en niños con hipoacusia hablantes de español. Trabajo desafiante el de la producción, y en esta población aún más. ¡Bravo!

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 ¿?

🤣

Industrial air pollution and newborn hearing screening failure Hearing loss in newborns is a prevalent issue that can hinder the growth of language skills and cognitive development. Given that hearing loss often c…

"Our findings indicate that maternal exposure to these PM2.5-bound metals may adversely affect newborn hearing, underscoring air pollution as a modifiable risk factor for improving hearing health outcomes." From: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #pollution #hearing #health #keeplistening

Confirmo 10000%

Trabajadorxs de Conicet reclaman contra el cierre del organismo, el desfinanciamiento del sistema científico, los despidos y la reducción salarial en el Estado👇

Sentence Comprehension in Spanish-Speaking Children With Hearing Loss: On the Integration of Morphosyntactic and Lexico-Semantic Cues Purpose: Children with hearing loss (CHL) who use hearing devices (cochlear implants or hearing aids) and communicate orally have trouble compreh...

The article can be downloaded from here: pubs.asha.org/doi/10.1044/...

Huge thanks to all the schools, teachers and families who collaborated on this study!

First of many works headed by Analí Taboh and co-authored with Diego Shalom and Belén Álvarez.

📣Publication alert! I'm really thrilled to announce that our first paper on sentence comprehension in Spanish-speaking children with hearing loss is online at Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research from @ashaweb.bsky.social.

Una tarde en la que celebramos logros, aprendizajes y rechazos acumulados, pero sobre todo, el ver todo lo que hicimos juntas. Terminando el año (¿?) feliz de hacer lo que me gusta, y de ver a este equipo que la rompe disfrutar tanto como yo. ¡Fue un gran 2024 para todas! @kineticradio.bsky.social