Hi Katy,

Welcome to Perlmonks!  I hope your experience here, and with Perl in general, will be a rewarding one.

It's a very good thing that you are using strict, and warnings (as provided by the -w).  They will help you to catch many potential problems early on.

The easiest way to get rid of a lot of your warnings/errors is to define the lexical variables you use, by prefixing them with my, or, if they are used in many places, declaring them at the top of your program.

For example:

my %Goodwords;
my $speakerID;
my %speaker;
my $good;
my %minresgen;
my $minres;
[download]

See if that gets you farther along.