 She is also the former President of the Acoustical Society of America and Vice President of Haskins Laboratories.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.