MEMBER

Marc Pell is a cognitive scientist interested in speech communication and emotion. He joined McGill University in 1997 and currently holds a senior research chair appointment as James McGill Professor in the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders. Between 2010-2019, he served as Director of the School and Associate Dean in the Faculty of Medicine, during which time he helped chart the strategic direction of the School and advised the Dean on all matters pertaining to the research, teaching, and administrative functioning of the School.

Marc Pell’s research specializes in how we communicate emotions, attitudes, and other intentions while speaking. Members of the “Neuropragmatics and Emotion Lab” aim to advance knowledge of how humans communicate and interact socially through analysis of social, cognitive, and neural dimensions of spoken language behaviour. Many of these studies focus on how emotions and interpersonal meanings (e.g., politeness, confidence) are communicated and understood through prosody (a speaker’s “tone of voice”). A complementary goal of this research is to understand how acquired disease of the brain affects the ability to communicate emotions and non-literal (“pragmatic”) meanings in spoken language. His work is currently funded by NSERC and SSHRC.