She completed her PhD in experimental phonetics at the University of Reading, and was a research associate in the Centre for Speech Technology Research at the University of Edinburgh from 1986-1988. After 2 years of postdoctoral study with Mary Beckman at the Ohio State University, she worked in the Speech Hearing and Language Research Centre, Macquarie University on an industry-funded project on speech synthesis. She has been at the University of Melbourne since 1993. Her research interests include intonation and prosody in Australian English, and the segmental/prosody interface in Northern Australian Indigenous languages.