This seminar is intended to be a trial run for a paper, which I will be presenting at the 1997 International Conference on Speech Processing to be held in Seoul from 25 Aug - 28 Aug. I share this paper with Dr Frantz Clermont.

The theoretical and empirical framework for our current study derives from two bodies of literature, which I will first survey as a brief introduction to this research area. Namely: (1) nativeness vs non- nativeness in spoken language; and (2) speaker and speech variability in the spectral regions spanning the three lowest resonance (or formant) frequencies of spoken vowels.

I will then present our recent, quantitative assessment of formant variability in 10 vowels produced in 2 different dialects of spoken Australian English. In particular, speaker-specific features will be contrasted with dialect-specific features together with their respective spectral regions of primary influence.