Katherine Safford Harris

Katherine Safford Harris is a noted psychologist and speech scientist. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita in Speech and Hearing at the CUNY Graduate Center and a member of the Board of Directors of Haskins Laboratories. She is also the former President of the Acoustical Society of America and Vice President of Haskins Laboratories.

Career Working with Alvin Liberman, Franklin S. Cooper and colleagues at Haskins Laboratories in the 1950s , the Pattern playback, a mechanical speech synthesis device, was used to help uncover the acoustic cues for the perception of phonetic segments (consonants and vowels). Liberman, Harris and colleagues proposed a motor theory of speech perception. Harris went on to lead the speech production program at Haskins Laboratories. In the 1960s Harris and colleague Peter MacNeilage were the first researchers in the U.S. to use electromyographic techniques, pioneered at the University of Tokyo, to study the neuromuscular organization of speech. In the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s Katherine Harris continued her pioneering work on speech production with colleagues Gloria Borden, Frederica Bell-Berti and many others. Of particular note is work on coarticulation that examined the phasing and cohesion of articulatory speech gestures.

She received degrees from Radcliffe College and Harvard University.

Awards In 1988 she won Honors of the Association from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, recognizing "contributions to the field of speech, language, and hearing," and the highest honor that the Association gives. In 2005 she won the Silver Medal in Speech Communication from the Acoustical Society of America "for research and leadership in speech production." In 2007 she won the ASA Gold Medal from the Acoustical Society of America "for pioneering research and leadership in speech production and dedicated service to the Society"