| 1 | Name: | Dr. Anne Cutler | |
| Institution: | University of Western Sydney, Australia | ||
| Year Elected: | 2007 | ||
| Class: | 3. Social Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 305 | ||
| Residency: | International | ||
| Living? : | Deceased | ||
| Birth Date: | 1945 | ||
| Death Date: | June 7, 2022 | ||
Born in Australia, as a postwar baby-boomer, Anne Cutler could benefit from a little-known side-effect of the wartime disruption of Europe: the extraordinarily high quality of language teaching in 1950s Australian schools. Overqualified refugee academics surviving by teaching their native language included her Belgian high-school teacher of French, and her Austrian teacher of German (with a University of Vienna Ph.D.). This background led her to study languages - at Melbourne University, where, thanks to regulations mandating a "science subject" in BA degrees, she discovered psychology as well. Psycholinguistics, investigating language with the methods of experimental psychology, emerged as an independent discipline in nice time for her Ph.D. study (at the University of Texas). Her research has centred on the recognition of spoken language, beginning (in her Ph.D.) with the role of rhythm and intonation in comprehension; since these vary greatly across languages, this prompted her to cross-linguistic comparisons. Her most important discoveries have concerned how adult processing of spoken language is exquisitely adapted to suit the native language (making for great efficiency in listening to the native language, but difficulty in listening to structurally different foreign languages). Her research was conducted from 1982 to 1993 at the Medical Research Council's Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge, UK (which she joined after postdoctoral fellowships at MIT and the University of Sussex), and from 1993 at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, where she served as director until 2013. She is currently Research Professor at Australia's MARCS Institute at the University of Western Sydney. Her awards include the Spinoza Prize of the Dutch Science Council (1999); further, she is a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, the Academia Europaea, the Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen, and the National Academy of Sciences (US). | |||