Loire Linguistics Laboratory (LLL)

Created as an UMR (joint research unit) in January 2012, the LLL reports to four bodies: the University of Orléans, the University of Tours, the CNRS (Ministry of Higher Education and Research) and the French national Library – Audiovisual Department (Ministry of Culture and Communication).

Based on surveys and data processing, the research questions of the LLL focus on oral corpora as sound documents used for research, whether it be within the framework of the Enquêtes Socio-Linguistiques à Orléans (ESLO : http://eslo.huma-num.fr/ - SocioLinguistic Survey in Orléans), of creoles, of research on English morphophonology or of studies on a wide range of languages (besides French, English and Spanish, some LLL researchers work on Arabic, Chiac, Chinese, Creoles, Dagara, Ikwéré, Ngbugu, Samba Leko, Teke, Sèmè, Wolof, etc.)

 The analysis which are carried out in the laboratory cover the full range of language science studies : phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, interactional analysis, etc.

Currently, the LLL is becoming more en more involved in the fields of applied linguistics, French didactics, Automatic Language Processing (ALP), translation studies and healtcare.

Research topics :

The LLL research focuses on the collection and analysis process of oral corpora and of audio documents. The research, carried out in close relationship with different laboratories and national institutions (BnF, DGLF-LF, HUMA-NUM, CORLI, MSH Val-de-Loire, etc.) makes it one of the reference center in the field in France and abroad and covers the entire oral corpus processing chain, from survey field, through annotation, tooling, cataloguing and long-term archiving, to societal and technological transfer. 
The LLL is currently scientifically structured in 3 teams.

1.    CADO : Constitution et Analyse de Données Orales
CADO aims to be a major actor in the firld of oral French processing in all its diversity, and a catalyst for innovation at the crossroads of linguistics and new technologies (ANR CREAM). The teams has chosen to structure itself into projects such as : 

ESLO: Which is the largest available data set on spoken French with around 500 hours of transcribed recordings (6 million words). Its implementation has made it a standard in oral work techniques, as well as being a reference corpus.

ALICS  (Linguistic Analysis of Interactions in Healthcare) aims to observe and collecte language data in healtcare contexts (consultations, examinations, etc.) in order to carry out linguistic analysis on the characteristics of interactions in healthcare contexts.

Séminaire PLCS-L&O: The seminar on Language practices and construction of knowledge – literacies and orality, aims to study literary language practices, both written and oral, and orality in all its specificity and diversity, from both a linguistic and didactic perspective.

2.    MP : Morpho-phonologie 
Based on dictionary databases of English, a study of the interface between phonology and morphology has been undertaken, in particular the relationship between spelling notations and prosodic interpretations through the modeling of stress patterns and their interaction with the segments is examined.

3.    VETD-DO : Variations : Enonciation, Typologie, Diachronie – Donnée Orales (VETD-DO : Variations : Enunciation, Typology, Diachrony – Oral Data)
The team combines two methodologies : typology and diachrony with the common aim of basing their reasoning on the comparison of different languages and different historical states of the same language. .