The IPA PhD Thesis Award to Anna Persson for the Doctoral thesis Comparing theories of pre-linguistic normalization for vowel perception (2024)

"In 2025, the IPA PhD Thesis Award Committee reviewed an exceptionally strong pool of submissions, with dissertations of very high scientific quality. After careful evaluation and discussion the committee decided to confer the award ex aequo, recognizing two outstanding theses whose scholarly excellence, originality, and contribution to the field of phonetics stood out in a particularly compelling way.

The awardees were Dr. Maria Lialiou, with the dissertation “Prosody and attention orienting: The role of rising intonation in speech processing”, and Dr. Anna Persson, with the dissertation “Comparing theories of pre-linguistic normalization for vowel perception”. These theses impressed the reviewers by their high scientific rigor, conceptual clarity, and substantial contribution to phonetic research.

Maria Lialiou is a researcher at the University of Cologne. Integrating neurophysiological and behavioral methods such as EEG, pupillometry, reaction time and memory tasks, alongside analyses of speech production data, she investigates how intonational cues guide listener attention and interact with pragmatic context to shape communication.

Up until recently, Anna was senior lecturer in Bilingualism at the Centre for Research on Bilingualism, Department of Swedish Language and Multilingualism, Stockholm University . She is now Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oslo. In her research, she investigates underlying cognitive mechanisms that enable stable speech perception across talkers, using a combination of acoustic analysis, perception experiments and computational models.

We warmly congratulate the winners and all the other applicants for the high standards achieved."

(Text from internationalphoneticassociation.org, Anna's current position is updated by our department.)