Alumni

Catherine Knowles

Lab Manager, 2008-2011

Catherine is currently working in Toronto...more details to come.

Chinar completed her Bachelor's and M.Phil. degrees in India before joining the lab in September, 2004. While in the lab, Chinar conducted acoustic studies of the interaction between emotional prosody and phonemic tone in Punjabi, and published a study of how patients with Parkinson's disease process emotional prosody in implicit and explicit contexts. For her dissertation, Chinar completed an ambitious study of how pitch and duration contribute to the perception of discrete emotions in speech, using acoustic-perceptual, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging techniques. Chinar successfully defended her PhD thesis in December, 2010.

Chinar is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institute in Baltimore, USA, working under the supervision of Dr. Argye Hillis.

Sample publications 

Dara, C., Monetta, L. & Pell, M.D. (2008). Vocal emotion processing in Parkinson’s disease: reduced sensitivity to negative emotions. Brain Research, 1188, 100-111.
ABSTRACT

Pell, M.D. & Dara, C. (2007). Explicit and implicit detection of vocal emotions by adults with Parkinson’s disease. Cognitive Neuroscience Society, New York, USA.

Dara, C., Monetta, L. & Pell, M.D. (2007). Sensitivity to affective dimensions of emotional prosody in patients with Parkinson’s disease. Cognitive Neuroscience Society, New York, USA.

Abhishek Jaywant

Research Assistant, 2008-2010

While completing his Bachelor's degree in Psychology at McGill (granted in 2009), Abhi worked as a research assistant, and then conducted a fourth year research project, on how patients with Parkinson's disease are perceived by naive listeners based on changes in their voice. Abhi also participated in two projects which investigated the nature of cross-modal emotional priming effects using the Facial Affect Decision Task.  Abhi is now pursuing his doctoral degree in Clinical Psychology at Boston University.

Selected publications

Paulmann, S., Pell, M.D., & Kotz, S.A. (2008). Functional contributions of the basal ganglia to emotional prosody: evidence from ERPs. Brain Research, 1217, 171-178.

Paulmann, S., Pell, M.D. & Kotz, S.A. (2008). How aging affects the recognition of emotional speech. Brain and Language, 104, 262-269.

Paulmann, S. & Kotz, S.A. (2008). An ERP investigation on the temporal dynamics of emotional prosody and emotional semantics in pseudo- and lexical sentence context. Brain and Language, 105(1), 59-69.

Rajashree Sen

Research Assistant, 2007-2008

During her time in the lab, Rajashree was completing her B.Sc. in Biochemistry at McGill. Although most interested in the "hard" sciences, Rajashree has a keen interest in psychology and language and played a central role in completing the "Hindi Study" while a member of the lab. Rajashree is now pursuing a graduate degree in Biochemistry at McGill.

Chantal came to the lab with a B.Sc. in Physiology from McGill and then completed a second undergraduate degree in Psychology while managing the lab. Chantal always had a strong interest in social and counselling psychology and was also a freelance piano teacher.

Chantal left the lab to pursue a graduate degree in Counselling Psychology in the McGill faculty of Education.

Henry completed a Bachelor’s degree in psychology at Concordia University (Montreal) where he investigated visual processing in children with developmental dyslexia. Henry then joined the lab in 1999 and completed an MSc thesis which sought to characterize the nature of deficits in pragmatic language and humour processing in patients with right hemisphere brain damage.

For his doctoral dissertation, Henry studied acoustic and perceptual factors which contribute to the communication of sarcasm and other attitudes in speech, and conducted cross-linguistic comparisons of these factors in English and Cantonese. During this period, Henry received a bursary from the CRIR and a three-year doctoral award from the CIHR (CIHR/K.M. Hunter Doctoral Research Award). On January 9th, 2008 Henry successfully defended his PhD dissertation entitled, "The sounds of sarcasm in English and Cantonese: a cross-linguistic production and perception study".

Henry is currently undertaking post-doctoral research at the Universite de Montreal in the lab of Dr. Pierre Jolicoeur.

Selected publications

Cheang, H.S. & Pell, M.D. (2008). The sound of sarcasm. Speech Communication, 50, 366-381.

Cheang, H.S. & Pell, M.D. (2007). An acoustic investigation of Parkinsonian speech in linguistic and emotional contexts. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 20, 221-241. ABSTRACT

Pell, M.D., Cheang, H.S., & Leonard, C.L. (2006). The impact of Parkinson’ s disease on vocal-prosodic communication from the perspective of listeners. Brain and Language, 97 (2),123-134.

Areej came to the lab in September, 2001 with a B.A. in English Language & Literature and an M.A. in Applied Linguistics from King Saud University (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia). As well, she had completed an M.A. degree from San Jose State University, California in Speech Language Pathology and had gained work experience as a certified speech-language pathologist, including experience developing clinical evaluation and therapy materials for Arabic.

During her doctoral training program, Areej focussed her research on the nature of discourse skills in adults with aphasia and how emotional content may facilitate verbal pragmatic features of their discourse. In November, 2007 Areej successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled, "Influence of emotionality on pragmatic features of discourse produced by Arabic-speaking adults with aphasia".

Areej is now an Assistant Professor at the College Dar Al-Hekma in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and continues to work clinically with adults with aphasia.

After completing a BA and MSc in Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology at the University of San Luis, Argentina, Laura obtained a PhD in Biomedical Science (Speech-Language Pathology) at the University of Montreal in 2004. Laura then joined the lab in the spring of 2004 to pursue research which focused on pragmatic communication disorders in brain-damaged populations.

While part of the lab, Laura initiated or participated in projects looking at the study of metaphor, irony and inference comprehension in patients with Parkinson's disease, as well as studies of emotion and nonverbal processing. Laura was awarded a highly competitive postdoctoral fellowship from the CIHR Institute of Aging (2005-2007) to conduct this research.

Laura is now an Assistant Professor of Speech-Language Pathology (Orthophonie) at Université Laval, Québec and continues to investigate cognitive and communication deficits in adults with Parkinson disease.

Selected publications

Monetta, L., Cheang, H.S. & Pell, M.D. (2008). Understanding speaker attitudes from prosody by adults with Parkinson's disease. Journal of Neuropsychology, 2, 415-430.

Monetta, L. & Pell, M.D. (2007). Effects of verbal working memory deficits on metaphor comprehension in patients with Parkinson's disease. Brain and Language, 101, 80-89.
ABSTRACT

Monetta, L., Ouellet-Plamondon, C.& Joanette, Y. (2004). Resource limitations as a determinant of right-hemisphere-damaged difficulties in processing alternative metaphorical meaning of words. Brain and Language, 91(1), 170-171.

Before joining the lab, Marie obtained an Undergraduate degree in Music from the University of Western Ontario and a Master's degree in Sound Recording from McGill University. She brought her background in acoustics and sound with her to the Pell lab in the spring of 2005 to work on a variety of projects including the Acoustics of Emotion and the TASIT study. While working as a research assistant in the Neuropragmatics and Emotion lab, Marie was the lab coordinator for the Child Phonology Lab of Dr. Susan Rvachew, which is part of the same department.Marie moved to Toronto to pursue a Master's in Business Administration (MBA) at the University of Toronto.

Before joining the lab, Nicole started a B.A. in Psychology at the University of the West Indies, in her beautiful island home of Barbados. She then transferred to Concordia University in Montreal and graduated with a B.A. Psychology Specialization degree. While at Concordia, Nicole researched obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorders in the Fear and Anxiety Laboratory.Despite her constant qualms with Canadian winters, Nicole decided to stay in Canada and acted as the Lab Manager from April 2005 to May 2007 while completing an M.A. in Counselling Psychology at McGill.Nicole currently resides in Toronto, Ontario and works as a Clinical Measurement Consultant for Harcourt Assessment Canada.

Elmira came to the lab in the spring of 2003 after completing a B.A. in Psychology at Concordia University (Montreal). She then served as a research assistant and lab manager for two years during which time she completed an M.A. in Counselling Psychology at McGill.Elmira is now living in Vancouver, British Columbia and works as a research lab manager at UBC.