Marc D. Pell, PhD
Distinguished James McGill Professor
School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, McGill University
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The Neuropragmatics and Emotion Lab (Pell Lab) is one of many research labs focused on social cognitive neuroscience and experimental pragmatics. We are located in the School of Communication Sciences & Disorders at McGill University in Montréal, Québec, CANADA. The School forms one of the units within McGill's Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences.
Humans communicate their emotions, attitudes, and intentions in a variety of ways while speaking — these can be detected in the content of language (what we say) and from vocal cues and expressions that accompany language (how we say it).
We specialize on how speech prosody ("tone of voice") is used to convey meaning in social interactions and how it is interpreted in different contexts of spoken language. In addition to how we express ourselves, who is speaking also matters: we are therefore looking at how social and cultural factors influence vocal communication, including how social identity markers such as foreign accents and AI-generated voices shape listener impressions of the voice. A complementary goal of our research is to understand how the brain processes vocal information to infer implied or nonliteral meanings communicated by a speaker. We test our hypotheses using acoustic, behavioural, electrophysiological, and functional neuroimaging methods, and are increasingly adopting a two-person neuroscience approach in our work.
This site provides an overview of our mission, ongoing projects, human talent, and recent activities. If you are interested in knowing more about our work, or if you wish to conduct research in association with the Pell Lab, do not hesitate to contact us.
The short video below offers a glimpse of our lab.
