She is Distinguished Professor Emerita in Speech and Hearing at the CUNY Graduate Center [2] and a member of the Board of Directors [3] Archived 2006-03-03 at the Wayback Machine of Haskins Laboratories.
Working with Alvin Liberman, Franklin S. Cooper and colleagues at Haskins Laboratories in the 1950s [4], 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).
In the 1960s Harris and colleague Peter MacNeilage [7] 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 [8] and many others.
Of particular note is work on coarticulation that examined the phasing and cohesion of articulatory speech gestures.