A guiding perspective of their research is to view speech and language as emerging from biological processes, including those of adaptation, response to stimuli, and conspecific interaction.

All of them are indebted to the pioneering work and leadership of Caryl Parker Haskins, Franklin S. Cooper, Alvin Liberman, Seymour Hutner and Luigi Provasoli.

Experimental psychologist Alvin Liberman joined Haskins Laboratories to assist in developing a "sound alphabet" to represent the letters in a text for use in a reading machine for the blind.

With this device, Alvin Liberman, Cooper, and Pierre Delattre (and later joined by Katherine Safford Harris, Leigh Lisker, Arthur Abramson, and others), discovered the acoustic cues for the perception of phonetic segments (consonants and vowels).

[10] Franklin S. Cooper and Katherine Safford Harris, working with 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.

It set the agenda for many years of research at Haskins and elsewhere by describing speech as a code in which speakers overlap (or coarticulate) segments to form syllables.

A further step toward a reading machine for the blind combined Mattingly's program with an automatic look-up procedure for converting alphabetic text into strings of phonetic symbols.

By the end of the decade this technology had advanced to the point where commercial concerns assumed the task of designing and manufacturing reading machines for the blind.

In 1973, Franklin S. Cooper was selected to form a panel of six experts[14] charged with investigating the famous 18-minute gap in the White House office tapes of President Richard Nixon related to the Watergate scandal.

Philip Rubin and colleagues developed Paul Mermelstein's anatomically simplified vocal tract model,[16] originally worked on at Bell Laboratories, into the first articulatory synthesizer[17] that can be controlled in a physically meaningful way and used for interactive experiments.

Work included experiments by Georgije Lukatela,[18] Michael Turvey, Leonard Katz, Ram Frost, Laurie Feldman,[19] and Shlomo Bentin, in a variety of languages.

Cross-language work on reading, including investigations of the brain process involved, remains a large part of Haskins Laboratories' program today.

Pugh, Donald Shankweiler, Weija Ni,[26] Einar Mencl,[27] and colleagues developed novel applications of neuroimaging to measure brain activity associated with understanding sentences.

[30] Donald Shankweiler, Susan Brady, Anne Fowler,[31] and others explored whether weak memory and perception in poor readers are tied specifically to phonological deficits.

Evidence rejected broader cognitive deficits underlying reading difficulties and raised questions about impaired phonological representations in disabled readers.

In 2008, Ken Pugh of Yale University was named President and Director of Research, succeeding Carol Fowler who remains at Haskins as a Senior Advisor.

[44] This was a three-day meeting of scientists and representatives from governmental and non-governmental organizations around the globe, who are working with programs in the developing world to support literacy and education in disadvantaged populations.