Hello everyone, BULA's final event of the semester will be taking place just over three weeks from now, so mark your calendars:

*How to Create Your Own Language Night* *When: Friday, Dec 1, 6pm* *Where: CAS B18* *Description: *Join BULA for a workshop where you'll be given a quick guide on how to create a constructed language (along the lines of Klingon from Star Trek, Dothraki from Game of Thrones, etc.), and then you'll get to work on creating the basic elements of your very own conlang, with guidance from Prof. Neil Myler. Pizza will be provided! *RSVP on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/688546351335903/ https://www.facebook.com/events/688546351335903/ *

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The Linguistics Program also has two very exciting colloquia coming up in the next month or so, which many BULA members will be interested in.

*Speaker: Melissa Baese-Berk (University of Oregon--also a BU alumn)* *Title: Perception of Non-native speech* *When: Thursday, Nov 16, 5:15pm* *Where: Life Sciences and Engineering (24 Cummington Mall) Room B01* *Abstract: *Listening to non-native speech often provides a significant challenge for native speakers of a language. While substantial work has examined how non-native speech differs from native speech, relatively little work has examined how native listeners perceive this speech. In this talk, I will present studies examining what factors might influence how native speakers perceive and can adapt to non-native speech. Experiments 1 and 2 examine how perception of non-native speech compares to the perception of other unfamiliar types of speech and, and what cognitive and linguistic factors might influence listeners’ abilities to perceive these types of unfamiliar speech. Experiment 3 investigates how native listeners adapt to non-native speech over time, and how exposure to speakers from different backgrounds may influence this adaptation. In Experiment 4, I will present production data investigating some global properties of non-native production that may influence perception of this speech by non-native speakers. I will discuss the implications of these studies for our understanding of non-native speech, and for perception more broadly. *RSVP on Facebook: **https://www.facebook.com/events/1399840486799971/ https://www.facebook.com/events/1399840486799971/*

*Speaker: Naomi Feldman (University of Maryland; Visiting Professor at MIT)* *Title: How phonetic learners should use their input* *When: Thursday, Dec 7, 5:30pm* *Where: **Life Sciences and Engineering (24 Cummington Mall) Room B01* *Abstract: *Children have impressive statistical learning abilities. In phonetic category acquisition, for example, they are sensitive to the distributional properties of sounds in their input. However, knowing that children have statistical learning abilities is only a small part of understanding how they make use of their input during language acquisition. This work uses Bayesian models to examine three basic assumptions that go into statistical learning theories: the structure of learners' hypothesis space, the way in which input data are sampled, and the features of the input that learners attend to. Simulations show that although a naïve view of statistical learning may not support robust phonetic category acquisition, there are several ways in which learners can potentially benefit by leveraging the rich statistical structure of their input. *RSVP on Facebook: **https://www.facebook.com/events/846247092203474/ https://www.facebook.com/events/846247092203474/*

Looking forward to seeing you there!

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