Language Sciences and Metrology Unit

Speech communication, language and measurement in the humanities are the three pillars of the MSL department, which develops educational, scientific and service activities at the intersection of these themes.

The Metrology and Language Sciences Department (MSL), directed by Professor Kathy Huet, develops pedagogical, scientific and service activities at the crossroads of three humanities themes: communication, language and measurement.

The teacher-researchers (3 full-time teachers, 1 FNRS qualified researcher, 4 part-time lecturers, 1 first assistant, 2 assistants with a mandate) attached to the service teach students registered for the bachelor's degree in general orientation (Mons site and Charleroi site) of the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences and also take charge of most of the courses offered to bachelor's degree students in the speech therapy orientation. They are also involved in the Master's programs in psychological sciences and Master's programs in educational sciences (Mons and Charleroi). These courses cover subjects that are essential for future psychologists, pedagogues and university speech therapists: developmental psychology, oral and written language, phonetics, psycholinguistics, language and communication disorders, quantitative techniques, advanced statistics, psychometrics, evaluation, and research methodology in the human sciences.

The MSL department is at the origin of the creation of the Institute of Research in Language Sciences and Technology (IRSTL link to web page); it is also a founding member of the Institute of Health Sciences and Technologies (ISTS web link) and contributes to the research work of the Institute of Complex Systems (COMPLEXYS web link). The researchers of the department also participate in the activities of the Centre de Recherche et de Formation Interdisciplinaire en Psychophysiologie et Électrophysiologie de la Cognition (CiPsE). The scientific work of the members of the MSL department focuses primarily on the analysis of oral communication phenomena. From this point of view, they belong to the speech sciences ("speech" being understood here both in the English sense - "speech sciences": study of acoustic phenomena related to communication - and in the Saussurian sense - "speech" as the individual and concrete side of "language", which is also constituted by "language", which constitutes its virtual and social side).

Most of the research activities of the Service are developed from the know-how and equipment of the Phonetics Laboratory, the oldest component of the Service, whose creation was concomitant with that of the State University in Mons.

The SMSL Service also contributes to the support platform in Statistics and Data Science of the UMONS: STATforU web link, of which it is a co-founder.