In 1978 Rialland defended her doctoral thesis, “Une langue à tons en terrasses, le gulmancema" at the University of Paris 5.^[2] In 1988 she defended her thèse d’état,^[3] “Systèmes prosodiques africains ou fondements empiriques pour un modèle multilinéaire,"^[4] at the University of Nice.

From the beginning, her scientific approach combined phonetic and phonological perspectives (autosegmental phonology, in particular). Over the years, her work investigated a broad range of languages, mainly African (from various language families: Gur, Mandé, Atlantic, Bantu), but also French and the whistled language of La Gomera. She has also supervised doctoral theses on the phonetics and phonology of a diverse range of languages (Berber, Bantu languages, Japanese, among others).^[5]

With Jacqueline Vaissière, Rialland co-directed the Laboratory of Phonetics and Phonology (LPP) in Paris for 15 years, from 1991 to 2006.^[6] Under their direction, the research orientation of the LPP turned towards integrating phonology and phonetics, based on experimental methods.

While at the LPP, Rialland was involved in a number of international collaborative projects funded by leading funding agencies. She co-directed, with Laura J. Downing, a French-German ANR-DFG project, BANTUPSYN, devoted to the Phonology-syntax Interface in Bantu languages (2009–2012).^[7] Rialland was one of the co-pilots of DIAREF, a project on child language acquisition (2010–2013).^[8] From 2015 to 2018 Rialland was a member of the French-German ANR-DFG project, BULB, which aims to apply cutting edge speech technologies to help document and analyze unwritten languages (2015–2018).^[9]

Rialland was President of the Société de Linguistique de Paris in 2016.^[10] She received an Honor Award from the West African Linguistic Society in 2017. In 2019 she was elected to the Academy of Europe.^[11]

She was married to G. Nick Clements, an American theoretical phonologist; they are the parents of two children, William R. Clements and Celia A. Clements.^[12]

• Clech-Darbon, Anne; Rebuschi, Georges; Rialland, Annie (1999). "Are There Cleft Sentences in French?". The Grammar of Focus. Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today. Vol. 24. p. 83. doi:10.1075/la.24.04cle. ISBN 978-90-272-2745-4.
• Clements, G., & Rialland, A. (2007). Africa as a phonological area. In B. Heine & D. Nurse (Eds.), A Linguistic Geography of Africa (Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact, pp. 36-85). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511486272.004
• Downing, Laura J.; Rialland, Annie (2016). Intonation in African Tone Languages. doi:10.1515/9783110503524. ISBN 9783110503524.
• Rialland, Annie (2005). "Phonological and phonetic aspects of whistled languages". Phonology. 22 (2): 237–271. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.484.4384. doi:10.1017/S0952675705000552. S2CID 18615779.
• Rialland, Annie (2007). "Question prosody: An African perspective". Tones and Tunes: Typological Studies in Word and Sentence Prosody. Phonology and Phonetics. Vol. 1. pp. 35–62. doi:10.1515/9783110207569.35. ISBN 978-3-11-019057-1.
• Rialland, Annie; Robert, Stéphane (2001). "The intonational system of Wolof". Linguistics. 39 (5). doi:10.1515/ling.2001.038.