It is an established tradition that researchers from many countries get together on the average every three years for a two week Advanced Studies Institute on Automatic Speech Recognition and Synthesis. According to ASI policies the Institute is financed by NATO. This book contains the texts of lectures and papers contributed by the attendees of the ASI which was held July 2 - 14, 1984, at Bonas, Gers, France. Focussed on New Systems and Architectures for Automatic Speech Recognition and Synthesis, this book is divided into 4 parts: (a) Review of ba8ic algorithm8 (b) SY8tem architecture and VLSI for automatic Speech (c) Software 8Y8tem8 for automatic 8peech recognition, (d) Speech 8ynthe8i8 and phonetic8. Due to the international nature of the Institute, the readers will find in this book different styles, different points of view and applications to different languages. This reflects also some characteristics of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (!APR) whose technical committee on Speech Recognition has organized this ASI. Proposed contributions have been reviewed by an Editorial Committee composed of W. Ainsworth (Kent), R. Bisiani (Pittsburgh), J. P.
Haton (Nancy), W. Hess (Munich), J. L. Houle (Montreal), P. Laface (Turin), R. Moore (Malvern), H. Niemann (Erlangen) and J. Ohala (Berkeley). Typesetting of the book was performed using SYMSET facilities developed entirely by the Department of Computer Science at Concordia University. Special thanks are due to L. Lam, H. Monkiewicz and L. Thiel.