Dr Marcus Perlman BA, MA, MS, PhD

• PhD in Cognitive Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz
• MS in Cognitive Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz
• MA in Applied Linguistics, Georgia State University
• BA in Linguistics, Rice University

I joined the Department of English Language and Linguistics in September of 2017. Before coming to Birmingham, I earned my PhD in Cognitive Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with Raymond Gibbs. Following this, I was a postdoc at the Gorilla Foundation, where I studied under the gorilla Koko. I then did postdocs in Cognitive and Information Sciences at the University of California, Merced, and in Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Most recently, I was a postdoc in the Language and Cognition department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.

This academic year I will be teaching modules in:

• Investigating Language (BA)
• Language, Senses, and Sound Symbolism (BA, with Bodo Winter)
• Psycholinguistics (MA)

I am looking to supervise postgraduate research on topics at the intersections of psycholinguistics, multimodality, metaphor, and especially iconicity. Some specific points of interest include:

Experimental studies of iconicity and metaphor in language production and understanding
Multimodal approaches to iconicity and metaphor in natural conversation, including the use of multimodal corpora
Experimental studies of iconicity and metaphor in the emergence and evolution of communication systems

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

My research is driven by two big questions. What is language? and Where did it come from? My main angle into these questions is through iconicity – resemblance between the form of a signal and its meaning. My work examines iconicity across a range of phenomena, from prosody in the production of spoken sentences, to word learning by children, to the gesturing of gorillas. I am especially interested in the role of iconicity in the evolution of human communication and the ongoing historical development of languages.

Please visit my personal website to see my CV and a complete list of publications. You might also take a look at some of the following media attention to my work:

• Think your dog talks like people? Scientists say you might just be right. Washington Post, January 19, 2017
• Buzz! Thwack! How sounds become words. Science, March 31, 2016
• Why dogs growl and light flickers. Scienceline, February 29, 2016.
• Has Koko the gorilla really learnt to talk? BBC (Earth Blog), August 21, 2015.
• How a coughing ape is changing our ideas about animals, humans and language. Washington Post, August 18, 2015
• Spoken language could tap into ‘universal code’. Science, August 12, 2015
• How did our ancestors develop the very first language? New Scientist, August 7, 2015
• A famous gorilla plays the recorder, and we all may learn something. NPR (13.7 Cosmos & Culture blog), February 2, 2012