Matt Kelley

Matt Kelley

Matt Kelley

Director of the Phonetics and Phonology Lab

Assistant Professor

phonetics, spoken word recognition, computational methods, speech perception, speech acoustics, automatic speech recognition, speech technology

Matthew (Matt) C. Kelley is a specialist in how speech is produced and understood. He completed his PhD in linguistics at the University of Alberta in late 2021 and received the degree in 2022. After completing his PhD, he took on a postdoc in linguistics at the University of Washington, where he served as acting director of the University of Washington Linguistic Phonetics Lab, taught phonetics and computational methods, and conducted research on speech intelligibility and consonant clusters. He started at George Mason University in August 2023.

Kelley is keenly interested in how a listener goes from hearing sounds to understanding and recognizing words. He employs methods that explicitly account for the characteristics of the sounds that listeners hear, which historical and current models have ignored or left for future research.

He is also developing tools that automate tedious tasks in phonetics. One example is annotating the boundaries of where individual speech sounds occur in a recording. Tools that automate this process sit at the intersection of acoustic phonetics, linguistics, and machine learning/artificial intelligence.

Selected Publications

Kelley, M. C., Perry, S. J., & Tucker, B. V. (2024). The Mason-Alberta Phonetic Segmenter: A forced alignment system based on deep neural networks and interpolation. Phonetica, 1–58. https://doi.org/10.1515/phon-2024-0015

Kelley, M. C. (2024). Broad and fine acoustic categories in bod, bond, bald, and bard: A step toward acoustic phonology. Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics, 54(1), 060001. https://doi.org/10.1121/2.0001899

Perry, S. J., Kelley, M. C., & Tucker, B. V. (2024). Documenting and modeling the acoustic variability of intervocalic alveolar taps in conversational Peninsular Spanish. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 155(1), 294-305.

Kelley, M. C., & Tucker, B. V. (2022). Using acoustic distance and acoustic absement to quantify lexical competition. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 151(2), 1367-1379. Open access link.

Kelley, M. C., & Tucker, B. V. (2020). A comparison of four vowel overlap measures. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 147(1), 137-145. Open access link.

Courses Taught

  • Ling 800: Advanced Seminar in Linguistics
  • Ling 515/715: Statistical Methods for Linguistics
  • Ling 331/531/731: Phonetics
  • Ling 332/532/732: Phonology A
  • Ling 333/533/733: Phonology B

Education

  • PhD, Linguistics
    University of Alberta, 2022
  • MSc, Linguistics
    University of Alberta, 2017
  • BA, English (Linguistics emphasis) and Spanish majors
    Computer Science minor
    Boise State University, 2015
    Magna cum laude
    Distinguished honors from the Honors College