Mots-Clefs DDL

Although the cognitive representation and processing of language have been studied through complementary approaches for quite a few years, several questions remain unanswered owing to the complexity of the problem. Language identification provided a paradigm well suited to the study of the cognitive representations of foreign languages through perceptual experiments and functional cerebral imaging.

Automatic Language Identification (ALI) as a discipline appeared about thirty years ago; but intensive research in the area only dates back to the beginning of the nineties. Most of the systems that have been developed to this day have quite logically borrowed methods from automatic speech or speaker recognition. Although these systems are rather efficient and already allow us to come up with solutions in some fields (particularly in multilingual human-computer interfaces), they fail to address most of the linguistic and cognitive problems linked to the notion of inter-language distance (automatic typology, differences between languages and dialects, modelling of the cognitive processing of linguistic distance, etc.)

The notion of linguistic distance is closely connected to research in phonetico-phonological typologies both at the segmental and suprasegmental levels. Recording and analyzing corpora (specifically, dialectal corpora) lies at the root of the linguistic studies we carry out. We more particularly concentrate on the description of languages belonging to the Afro-Asiatic (especially Arabic and Berber dialects) and the Germanic families (British English dialects). We focus on phonetico-phonological, prosodic, morpho-syntactic, and lexical aspects).