statistical NLP with R

One of the areas I still need to study is statistical NLP, I lack even the mathematical background although I took a probability course for Math majors at Cornell a long time ago. 

I came across this article about the R programming language and open source software package (community?).  It seems there are some people applying it to speech processing, with the EMU Speech Database System. 

There is even work related to language corpora (book draft) and multi-language annotation (not free :(  tho), which I haven't reviewed yet.