Jenny Roche is the director of the MADI Lab and has reseach interests in communication in a social context. She is especially interested in the cognitive mechanisms that drive communication (successful and unsuccessful). She views communication as being richly linguistic, psycholingustic, and social, which dynamically interact with and influence adaptation to complex and novel conversational situations. Much of her reseach has focused on acoustic aspects of affective speech, perspective taking, and psycholinguistic cues to miscommunicaiton. She has an expertise in acoustics of affective speech production and social pragmatics. To contact Jenny, please visit her website: www.jennyroche.com
Graduate Researchers
Current: The MADI Lab currently has three graduate student researchers working on independent projects, theses, and dissertation. We also collaborate with doctoral students in the Learning Science program (formerly Educational Psychology).
Huda Yassin is a Master’s student in speech-language pathology. Her research interests are related to multi-cultural communication.
Learning Science Graduate Affiliates
Yin “Irving” Zhang is a doctoral student in Learning Science with an interest in psycholingusitics. Irving works on projects related to semantic representations, hedging in political communication, and the impact of vocal hedging on the interpretation of language.
Shruti Kate is a doctoral student in Learning Science with an interest in the impact of hedging on interpreting scientific facts and misconceptions.
Katie Asaro is a doctoral student in Learning Science with an interest in the role of communication style on social judgments and the impact on learning in virtual environments.
Former Graduate Students:
Dr. Hamada Alzoubi took a postdoctoral fellowship position at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. During his doctoral studies, his reserach interests are related to auditory and visual perception, and is doctoral dissertation investigates the role of multi-modal integration of auditory and visual noise during speech perception.
Dr. Grace Murray was a doctoral student in the EPSY lab, an affiliate with the MADI Lab. Dr. Murray’s research interests were dedicated to dispelling scientific misconceptions. She is now the Director of Learning Strategies at the Laurel School.
Mitchell McLean is a Master’s student in speech-language pathology. His thesis investigates the endorsement of microaggressions by pre-professional health care and education students.
Zach Haine’s was a Master’s student in speech-language pathology with research interest in humor and pragmatics. He is currently practicing in speech-language pathology.
Gino Cioffi’s research interests focus on bio stats, with an interest in Big Data. He currently works for the National Cancer Institute as a biostatistician and is working towards his doctoral degree at George Mason University.
Ashley Ferguson’s research interests focused on social perceptions of person’s who stutter. Thesis: “Social Perceptions of Speech Disfluencies.” She is currently practicing in speech-language pathology.
Christine Suh’s research interests focus on how cultural competence impcats communicative effort. Thesis: "Cultural Miscommunication in L1 vs L2: How do listeners respond?” She is currently practicing in speech-langauge pathology.
Lindsay Vale’s research interests focus on the impact of socio-pragmatic cues has on communication. Independent Study: "Intonational Punctuation in Natural Text-Based Communication.” She is currently practicing in speech-language pathology.
Undergraduate Researchers. The MADI lab also regularly has a number of amazing undergraduate students that contribute to the functioning of data collection.