Comparing acoustic analyses of Australian English vowels from Sydney : Cox (2006) versus AusTalk

This study presents a comparison of the acoustic properties of Australian English monophthongs produced by 60 monolingual females from Sydney's Northern Beaches reported in Cox's [1] corpus and by the four monolingual females from Sydney recorded within the AusTalk corpus [2]. Cross-corpus discriminant analyses are used to investigate the acoustic similarity between the two corpora to determine whether the values from these corpora would be appropriate for predicting L2 difficulty in future cross-linguistic studies using Western Sydney speakers. Preliminary findings suggest that there is little overall acoustic similarity across these two vowel corpora as classification scores from the discriminant analyses were consistently higher for the Cox corpus than AusTalk. In particular, greatest variation between the two corpora is observed in their productions of front vowels. Limitations for drawing conclusions based on the current data are provided and the need for an additional corpus of Australian English vowels from speakers in Western Sydney for future cross-linguistic studies is proposed.