Hello BULA-ers, Just a reminder that we have a couple of excellent linguistics-related events coming up in the next week, starting with the final BULA event of the semester, tomorrow's How to Create Your Own Language Night!

*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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Also, don't forget that the Linguistics Program's final Colloquium of the semester is taking place next Thursday:

*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/*

Hope to see many of you there!

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