This volume in the Basic Research Series consists of the proceedings of the Symposium on Natural Language and Speech held during the ESPRIT Conference of November 1991 – a conference that serves to open up ESPRIT results not only to the ESPRIT community but also to the entire European IT industry and its users. The symposium is organised by the newly launched Network of Excellence on Language and Speech (3701) which brings together the foremost European experts and institutions in these two domains. By bringing together these two communities, which have so far been working in relative isolation from each other, the network aims to augment the focusing of research onto the long-term goal of the "construction of an integrated model of the cognitive chain linking speech to reasoning via natural language". To advance towards this industrially significant goal, the network operates at different levels – a strategy for research, a coordination for the training of needed researchers and a coordination of the use of its resource and communication infrastructure for the most efficient interworking of the members of the community who are spread all over Europe. This symposium is a small but significant building block for the achievement of the goals of the network.