Dr Gerardo Ortega BA, MA, PhD

• PhD Cognitive, perceptual and Brain Sciences (University College London, UK) 2013
• MA Applied Linguistics (Universidad de las Americas, Mexico) 2006
• BA Environmental Engineering (Universidad de las Americas, Mexico) 2003

Gerardo completed his PhD at the Deafness, Language and Cognition Research Centre at University College London under the supervision of Gary Morgan and Bencie Woll. He then took a position as postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands under the supervision of Asli Ozyurek. After six years in the Netherlands, he accepted a lecturer position at the department of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Birmingham. In addition ot his research projects, Gerardo is actively engaged in the research community and contributes as ad hoc reviewer for journals and funding agencies including Sign Language and Linguistics, Second Language Research, Language Learning, Cognition. Psychological Science, and Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst.

I am currently teaching the under graduate modules Investigating Language, Theories of Language, and Applied Linguistics

I am always interested in discussing the possibility of supervising PhD students to pursue research on the acquisition of sign languages as a second or first language, sign language processing, the interface between gesture and sign.

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Find out more - our PhD English Language and Applied Linguistics  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

The main focus of his research is to explore the underlying mechanisms behind the acquisition of a sign language. He primarily focuses on how hearing people - who already master a spoken language - go on to acquire a sign language as second language. He has also worked on sign language learning by deaf children. Using a wide range of techniques such as naturalistic observation, behavioural tasks, and electrophysiological methods, he has investigated how iconicity and gesture contribute to sign learning and processing. In a different line of research he has also investigates how the different strategies to communicate with iconic gesture may serve as scaffolding for language emergence and evolution. He has carried out extensive research in different sign languages (British Sign Language, Sign Language of the Netherlands, Turkish Sign Language, and Mexican Sign Language) as well as cross-cultural studies in gesture production and comprehension.