This volume presents the proceedings of the Symposium on Natural Language and Speech held during the ESPRIT conference of November 1991. The symposiumwas organized by the newly launched Network of Excellence on Language and Speech which brings together the foremost European experts and institutions in the two domains. The proceedings contain ten invited papers from leading experts in language and speech research, together with a set of position papers from a panel session on 'Spoken language systems:technological goals and integration issues'. The papers cover a wide spectrum of research topics, ranging from logical aspects of discourse structure to problems of prosody and automatic speech understanding. A recurrent theme is the development of an integrated cognitively motivated theory of the process by which spoken language is understood. This volume is the second of the ESPRIT Basic Research Series. The ESPRIT Basic Research efforts aim at forging stronglinks between academic and industrial teams carrying out research, often interdisciplinary, at the forefront of information technology. The quality of content of this series and its broad distribution should have a majorimpact in making these advances accessible to both academic and industrial researchers.