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The project “Endangered Languages of Latin America and Africa : Description, Documentation and Typology” situates itself in the new problematic of Documentation – Description – Archiving (DDA) of Endangered Languages (EL) which is concerned with the preservation of the Intangible Cultural Heritage on the world level and with the emergence of a new approach to Linguistics, known as Documentary Linguistics.
The project combines the expertise of two teams from the DDL Laboratory (Americanists and Africanists) and draws from the experience of a large number of researchers organised in an international network. It builds upon research dynamics already set in motion and upon a well-established collaboration between University (Lyon, France) and research laboratory (CNRS) which offers the perspective of both recruiting and supervising students and linguists ready to orient themselves towards the problematic of DDA of Endangered Languages.

The CBOLD website is closed due to an Internet attack.
For safety reasons, it will not be back online until a major upgrade is performed.
We are unable to provide a schedule so far and we are really sorry for the inconvenience.

The DiaDM project is a Web-based collaborative platform that aims to compile, organize and explore hypotheses about the putative processes by which the diversity of the world’s languages came to be and the structures of the protolanguages from which today’s languages are supposedly derived. The targeted ‘data’ are therefore reconstruction hypotheses of proto-structures, proto-lexicons and sound change.
The ultimate goal of the DiaDM project is to create tools and resources to manage the evolving universe of data and methods about the evolution of languages in such a way that researchers from inside as well as outside the field of linguistics can easily comprehend their larger context ("what processes justify this reconstruction?"), compare and contrast hypotheses ("where do these two language relationship hypotheses agree and disagree?"), identify patterns and tendencies and synthesize concepts and data into ever more comprehensive and useful models and methods to reconstruct the past of today’s languages. As such, the DiaDM Project aims to facilitate the access, development and testing of hypotheses about the evolution of languages by providing a unified framework in which a range of exploratory methods complement a body of comparable and directly interpretable reconstruction hypotheses from diverse language areas and families.
The DiaDM project is designed to allow the community of linguistic experts to author, curate and connect a diversity of proto-language reconstruction hypotheses, and the scientific community at large to access this body of data in a comprehensive and unified format to develop and experiment original analytical approaches. To ensure the quality of the linguistic data is preserved, we have focused on developing a fully public Web resource associated with secure personal workspaces.

The SpiN project stands at the frontier between experimental linguistics and cognitive neuroscience research. It aims at achieving a critical break-through in the domain of speech-in-noise comprehension by setting up a dedicated interdisciplinary research team. The comprehension of speech in noise is a complex task even for normal hearing people and it is the primary and principal problem experienced by people facing hearing loss or auditory processing disorders. Under ecological conditions, a speech signal scarcely ever reaches the ear without any interfering noise. We will study our capacity to understand speech by relying on the interaction between auditory processing and the specialized cognitive processes involved in speech comprehension and degraded speech restoration. The originality of our approach is to investigate natural speech comprehension both from a language-based and an auditory-driven perspective, using the same synergy as is brought into play when those systems work to achieve speech comprehension. To this end, several experimental techniques including behavioural assessment, electrophysiological measurements and neuroimaging will be used to conduct tests in different target populations (normal hearing participants, hearing impaired and speech processing impaired patients). A systematic evaluation of auditory performances will be done and compared to results of all experiments carried out. In all the results we will highlight the inter-individual variability observed in speech comprehension performances. This will allow us to unravel the links between sensory processes and speech intelligibility and obtain valuable information for the understanding of the neurocognitive processes underlying the comprehension of speech in general. Understanding speech restoration in ecological situations constitutes a challenge that scientists are bound to face as it is becoming such an important societal issue given the omnipresence of noise in modern societies.