I have just returned from Groningen, where I had the pleasure of teaching Bayesian Regression for Language Scientists at the LOT Summer School to a wonderful group of PhD and master’s students.
It was incredibly rewarding to see such a strong interest in Bayesian methods. For many participants, Bayesian statistics was entirely new, and one of the most gratifying pieces of feedback was that the course had opened up new ways of thinking about statistical modeling and data analysis.
Despite the heatwave, we covered a lot of topics: from the foundations of Bayesian statistics and prior specification to practical modeling and diagnostics with brms in R, and did many hands-on exercises on experimental, corpus, and typological data.
Bayesian methods are still relatively new in many areas of linguistics, but they offer powerful and flexible tools for answering the kinds of questions we language scientists care about.
A big thank you to the organizers, and especially to all the students, for making this such a fun and inspiring week. I’m excited to see how the next generation of language scientists will put Bayesian methods to work.
Course description: https://lotschool.nl/events/lot-summer-school-2026/#toggle-id-16