Soft particle production and study of collective phenomena with the ALICE detector at the LHC

After the successful completion of the first LHC run, a comprehensive set of light flavour hadron measurements at midrapidity in pp, p-Pb and Pb-Pb collisions is available for detailed comparisons with soft particle-production models. The observation of a medium in local thermal equilibrium in nucleus-nucleus collisions is supported by the success of thermal and hydrodynamic models in the description of hadron yields and spectral shapes, respectively. However, the presence of collective phenomena in small systems created in pp and p-Pb collisions is still debated. In this paper, similarities and differences between large and small collision systems with respect to a mass dependent evolution of the spectral shapes will be highlighted. In addition, the experimental significance of the deviations of particle yields observed between data and thermal model expectations will be discussed.