A pioneer in her field, Cutler's work focused on human listeners' recognition and decoding of spoken language.

[5] In 1993, she became a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and held that title until 2012.

[5] Cutler was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2015 for her work on sentence processing and phoneme recognition.

[13] Her work has also received the 1999 Spinoza Prize of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research[14] and the International Speech Communication Association Medal.

[5] In 2020 she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA)[15] and she received the Silver Medal in Speech Communication from the Acoustical Society of America (ASA).