Marcus Perlman

I am a lecturer in English Language and Linguistics. My research examines iconicity in speech and gesture, with special interest in the evolution of human communication. I also study the gesturing and vocal behaviour of great apes.

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.

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.