I have included the abstract from the paper to the right, along with a download link. In essence, quantitative formant analysis, based off much previous research, showed that there is an acoustic similarity between the vowel in no, so, go, etc. in Australian English, and the vowel in or, more, sore, etc. in American English. I am currently working on reformatting this paper in LaTeX.

Abstract

-aur memeing, in which a speaker emulates an exaggerated Australian English variety, has become popular in online platforms as of the early 2020s. It can be noted, however, that some native speakers of an Australian English variety, anecdotally, do not understand the exaggeration when it comes to the GOAT lexical set vowel. It was hypothesized that, given this apparent mismatch in perception, that there are potentially multiple realizations of the Australian English GOAT lexical set vowel. To investigate why there is this mismatch in perception, the GOAT vowels of speakers of several varieties were analyzed through the speech analysis tool Praat, and compared with those of Australian English speakers. It was determined from this analysis that there are, in fact, multiple realizations of the Australian GOAT vowel, differing in rhoticity, though no relationship between age and rhoticity could be found. The General American FORCE lexical set appears most similar to rhotic Australian English GOAT, while the Received Pronunciation GOAT lexical set appears most similar to non-rhotic Australian English GOAT. The General American GOAT vowel is not similar to either, but is numerically closer to the non-rhotic Australian English GOAT realization. This, in total, could be a potential mechanism behind the mapping of the AuE GOAT vowel to the GenAm FORCE vowel in imitations. Other speakers of AuE might not notice this difference, which creates confusion on their part when General American speakers associate the vowels in this way.

Keywords: meme, Australia, English, formant, lexical set