How do listeners segment the continuous speech input into words? This paper addresses this important question by reviewing current views of lexical segmentation. After providing some background to the more general problem of spoken word recognition, we examine the different cues - including phonetic, phonological, prosodic, and lexical cues - that have been shown to play a role in speech segmentation. We then analyze how these cues are used to locate alignment points in the continuous speech signal. These points serve to define what parts of the signal are matched with which representations in the mental lexicon. Several solutions to the alignment problem are discussed in light of existing experimental evidence.

After reviewing certain customary considerations concerning the written-spoken division, the present paper attempts to demonstrate that when we take into account the data provided by French corpora we are obliged to qualify the terms of the contrast and to considerer in a new light the relations between language users and their language.

This study addresses prosodic evolution in the French news announcer style, based on acoustic analysis of French audiovisual archives. A 10-hour corpus covering six decades of broadcast news is investigated automatically, focusing on word-initial stress, which may give an impression of emphatic style. Objective measurements suggest that the following features have decreased since the forties: mean pitch, pitch rise associated with initial stress, and vowel duration characterising an emphatic initial stress. The onsets of stressed initial syllables have become longer while speech rate (measured at the phonemic level) has not changed. This puzzling outcome raises interesting questions for research on French prosody, suggesting that the durational correlates of word-initial stress have changed over time, in the French news announcer style.

The desire to make use of large collections of oral data is nowadays largely shared by linguists. At a time when such tools are becoming increasingly available for French, it is important to make sure that there is sensitivity to all of those factors which guarantee reliability in the different stages of obtaining data: clarification of the term ‘corpus’; reflection on approaches to the field and to orality, and on representativeness (both in terms of genres and numbers of speakers); data elicitation practices and transcription.

The PAC project (The Phonology of Contemporary English: usage, varieties, structure) aims at giving a better picture of spoken English in its unity and its geographical, social and stylistic diversity. Based on Labovian methods, the project seeks to describe both rhotic and non rhotic accents of English, from traditional standards to more recent postcolonial varieties. This large corpus enables researchers to analyse and compare intervarietal features such as rhoticity as well as more specific phenomena such as vocalic length in Australian English or variable rhoticity in New Zealand English. Today LVTI, a collaborative project aiming at an interdisciplinary sociolinguistic survey of great urban centres such as Manchester and Toulouse is being set up following the PAC/PFC classical protocol.

This article presents the structure of the Corpus International Ecologique de la Langue Française, an extensive corpus of spoken French that will soon be available on the Internet, from both an epistemological and empirical perspective. Explanations are given with regard to the ideas that guided the data collection (ecological approach, comparability of the different areas of the Francophonie and communication situations) and to the choices made ("communicative spaces" and "activity types") with a view to relevant analyses in various research fields (variation, interaction, multimodality, French in contact, oral syntax) and an attempt is made to fill existing gaps in the current corpus. The article further addresses the issue of building up a network of experts, problems that had to be solved during fieldwork in the different areas and questions concerning standardisation, archiving and publication of the collected data (audio and video recordings, transcriptions, metadata), whereupon several examples are presented for comparative analyses.

One of the main problems in establishing linguistic dysfunctioning resides in the definition of the 'comparison group'. The numerous studies today in the domain of oral proficiency, have shown that comparing oral with written language production can seriously bias the outcome. As for children's speech, the evaluation is sometimes even more seriously biased by what may be called 'adultocentrism', which allows to conclude too hastily and/or erroneously for language dysfunctioning. In this article we want to show what can be considered as common errors in oral language proficiency of children, and what might be indicative of more specific problems.