Welcome to my website!

Hi there! My name is Matt, and I'm an assistant professor in linguistics at George Mason University and the director of the Mason Phonetics and Phonology Lab (MPL). I specialize in phonetics. My research interests are largely in applying computational methods to understanding speech perception and spoken word recognition, focusing primarily on acoustic data. My dissertation focused on situating computational phonetic comparisons of words in acoustic absement and distance comparisons instead of phonemic string comparisons.

I am lead developer the Mason-Alberta Phonetic Segmenter (MAPS), which is a new tool for forced alignment that implements interpolation and ensemble techniques for more precise boundaries and estimating confidence intervals for boundaries. which I also develop the Julia package Phonetics.jl, which provides convenience functions for researchers in phonetics, such as for vowel plotting, vowel normalization, and acoustic absement and distance comparisons. I have also written the PraatDocExtractor program, which extracts documentation from a Praat script and exports it to a Markdown file for you to use in the process of documenting your code.

I love talking about my research, so if you would like to get in contact with me, feel free to send me an email at mkelle21@gmu.edu.