Cinzia Avesani is a speech scientist with a special interest in the prosody of the spoken language. She has received her PhD in Linguistics at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and worked as language consultant at AT&T Bell Laboratories. She is vice president of the Italian Speech Science Association (AISV- Associazione Italiana di Scienze della Voce).

Her main research interests  focus on the phonological and phonetic aspects of intonation, approached from a Laboratory Phonology perspective. She has published papers on the phonetics and phonology of Italian intonation; on prosody and discourse structure; on the prosody-syntax interface; on the prosodic disambiguation of potentially ambiguous semantic and syntactic structures in a cross-linguistic perspective; and on prosody and information structure. She has worked also on timing and coarticulation,  and on the articulatory bases of prominence within the frameworks of Articulatory Phonology and Task Dynamics. Her more recent interests concern non-native and second language speech perception.