| Citation | Professor Anne Cutler, Research Professor, MARCS Institute, University of Western Sydney and Emeritus Director, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen
Anne Cutler has explained some of the major puzzles concerning how listeners decode speech. She was the first to demonstrate that the mother tongue determines the way speech is segmented into units and that these units are different in different languages (syllable, stress, mora, respectively in French, English and Japanese). She has demonstrated that listeners adapt quickly to phonemic categories with different speakers and that this is done on the basis of abstract representations, and not episodic exemplars. She has also shown how prosodic context aids segmentation of the speech stream and has embedded a vast array of experimental findings into a coherent and widely accepted theoretical framework.
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