In Memoriam Anne Cutler (1945 – 2022)

In early June, professor Anne Cutler suddenly passed away shortly after having fallen ill on a trip to the Netherlands. Her first time in the Netherlands since the pandemic. Anne Cutler was a highly valued member of the Internationa

l Speech Communication Association (ISCA). In 2014 she received ISCA's highest honour, the ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement 'for charting the variation of speech perception across languages, and for her leadership in the field of speech perception research'.

Anne was a world-renowned psycholinguist. She helped shape the field of psycholinguistics through her research, which centred on how humans acquire and recognise spoken language. She pioneered many different research areas and was at the fore-front of many others: child language acquisition, the role of the native language on non-native speech processing, the role of prosody in spoken language learning and processing, to name but a few.

Anne obtained her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin where she was one of the first PhDs in the new field of psycholinguistics. She completed her post-doctoral training at MIT, and then worked at the Medical Research Council – Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge UK. From 1993 to 2013 she was the Director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. After German law required her to retire (for which she was absolutely not ready she once told me), she went back to her native Australia to continue her research as a research professor at the MARCS Institute, University of Western Sydney.

While Anne was a leader and pioneer in our field, she wasn’t only known for her research. She also played an important role within our community. Although Interspeech hosts research from speech science and speech technology, the fields are largely distinct. Anne has been instrumental in bridging these two complementary and important research areas. She was interested in understanding more about automatic speech processing and at the same time she reached out to people from the speech technology field to educate them on human speech processing. For example, together with Roger K. Moore she gave a tutorial on automatic and human speech processing at one of the Interspeech conferences, which was well-received. Anne really stood at the heart of the ISCA community.

Anne is remembered as a strong woman, an amazing scientist, having a great sense of humour, a brilliant mind, easy to talk to, and a great mentor for countless students, young researchers, and colleagues. She built a huge academic family, and I am honoured to be part of that special family. Anne also strongly believed in empowering women and helping women researchers, and as such has been an inspiration and role model for many more junior female researchers.

Anne will be dearly missed and we are forever grateful for Anne's leadership and for being such an amazing role model to all those she inspired, as well as future students and researchers that will learn and benefit from her lifelong contributions to psycholinguistics.

Anne Cutler

ISCA Medal 2014

Citation

For charting the variation of speech perception across languages and for her leadership in the field of speech perception research.

Biography

 Anne Cutler is professor in the MARCS Institute University of  Western Sydney and Processing program leader of the newly established ARC Center of Excellence  in the Dynamics of Language. She sudied in Australia, Germany and the US and worked in the UK (Sussex, Cambridge) and from 1993 to 2013 as director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Her research of which her book Native Listening (MIT Press, 2012) gives an overview, centres on human listeners' recognition of spoken language. It was tended over the years to involve a great many cross-linguistic comparisons (e.g. English, Dutch, German, Japanese, Cantonese, Korean, Sesotho, French, Spanish, Italian, Finish, Polish, Arabic, Telugu, Berber,-so far).

ISCA Vice-President

And one of Anne’s many academic “daughters”

An in memoriam from her university: https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/research/vale-distinguished-professor-cutler

If you want to leave memories or condoleances: https://www.mpi.nl/memories-of-anne-cutler