Past Events

Monita Chatterjee, Ph.D.
Waisman Center
September 19, 2025 @ 8:30 am - 9:30 am
Learn more about the Hearing and Donuts Seminar Series

Cochlear implant technology provides many children with severe/profound hearing loss the ability to hear sounds and acquire spoken language. However, some aspects of sounds such as the pitch of voices or musical instruments, are not conveyed well through the device. This leads to deficits in the communication of pitch-dominant information in speech, such as question/statement contrasts, speaker identification, lexical tones, and emotional information. In this presentation, I will describe our research team’s work on how school age children with cochlear implants perceive spoken emotions, predictors of individual variability in their outcomes, and links between their perception and production of emotions in speech.

Stephen Ferrigno, Ph.D.
150 Russell Laboratories
September 15, 2025 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Learn more about Prosem

The ability to represent complex sequences is widely considered a critical feature of human cognition with implications for language, counting, social reasoning, music, and action planning. This line of research aims to explore the nature and development of sequence representation, examine the computational mechanisms that support it, and test how these representations influence early learning. I will present evidence that both young children and monkeys can represent and generate novel strings of a hierarchical center-embedded grammar. These results challenge prevailing theories of human uniqueness and suggest that this ability may be evolutionarily conserved and available early in development. In addition, I will discuss recent work into the potential memory architectures that could underlie these representations, including push-down stacks, queues, and content addressable memory. Finally, I will discuss how the cognitive demands of sequence processing intersect with early mathematical learning, particularly in relation to common errors observed in children’s counting and numerical reasoning.

Maryann Krasko, M.S.
Room 1248, Health Sciences Learning Center
August 4, 2025 @ 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm

Prodromal Dysfunction in Vagal Systems in Parkinson Disease

Nicole Schaen-Heacock, M.S., CCC-SLP
Wiley Conference Room, Waisman Center
July 28, 2025 @ 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm

Prophylactic Exercise-Based Tongue Intervention on Swallow Function and Tongue Muscle Pathology in a Translational Model of Chemoradiation Therapy

Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center
May 29, 2025 - May 31, 2025
Learn More about SRCLD

Join us for the 2025 Symposium on Research in Child Language Disorders (SRCLD) at the Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center! Symposium on Research in Child Language Disorders Promotes high quality research on language disorders …

Hema Nair
62 Goodnight Hall
May 7, 2025 @ 2:30 pm - 4:30 pm

Interoception in Graduate Speech-Language Pathology and Engineering Students

Hayley Olson, B.S.
62 Goodnight Hall
April 28, 2025 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Learn more about Prosem

Verbal fluency tasks are used to assess language and executive function after stroke, yet traditional scoring methods may lack sensitivity to subtle semantic impairments in milder stroke populations. This study examines semantic distance, a computational measure of how closely related words are in meaning, as a metric for analyzing category fluency performance. Using a human perception-based semantic distance bigram model, we evaluated fluency data from individuals with left- and right-hemisphere subacute strokes and cognitively healthy adults (CHA). ANOVA revealed significant group differences in semantic distance, with CHA producing more semantically scattered responses than both stroke groups. Support Vector Regression was used to predict semantic distance from diffusion imaging metrics, demographic information, and clinical variables. The demographics-only model yielded the best performance (RMSE = 2.64, R² = 89.7%). Advanced diffusion outperformed standard diffusion models, highlighting the potential utility of more advanced diffusion measures. These findings suggest that semantic distance may capture meaningful language changes in post-stroke populations and that future work should explore its clinical and longitudinal applications across semantic models and fluency task types.

Joseph Roche, M.D.
Waisman Center
April 25, 2025 @ 8:30 am - 9:30 am
Learn more about the Hearing and Donuts Seminar Series

Congenital cytomegalovirus (cCMV) is a long-established etiology of congenital hearing loss with a wide spectrum of expression, ranging from typical / near-typical hearing abilities to profound hearing losses. This presentation will review the current state cCMV evaluation and treatment including work at UW-Madison and UW Health investigating the natural history of hearing ability evolution and its implications for treatment.

Olivia Goulette
62 Goodnight Hall
April 23, 2025 @ 3:30 pm - 5:30 pm

Associations Between Self-Reported History of Traumatic Brain Injury on Longitudinal Cognitive and Speech Changes Linked to Alzheimer's Disease Risk Factors

In Person & Virtual Options
April 22, 2025 @ 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm

The discussion group meeting will be dedicated to facilitating focused discussion on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Accessibility, and Belonging (DEIAB). This meeting will center on organizing student groups to foster open dialogues around DEIAB issues. The …