Marcus Perlman

THE LINGUISTIC LIFE OF THE KUFR QASSEM DEAF COMMUNITY LANGUAGE EMERGENCE, VARIATION, CHANGE, AND PERSISTENCE by MARAH JARAISI A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Supervised by Professor Adam Schembri and Dr. Marcus Perlman Department of Linguistics and Communication School of English, Drama, and Creative Studies College of Arts and Law University of Birmingham September 2025

Dedication This thesis is dedicated to the resilient Palestinian people. (poem) Because I am not like match sticks, I light up once… and die. but I am like the fires of the Magi: I burn… from my cradle to my grave and from my predecessors to my descendants. Long as the horizon is my breath, and I have mastered the craft of ants, gently for history is written the way we dictate By - Tawfiq Ziad -

Very excited to announce that yesterday I submitted my PhD thesis: The Linguistic Life of the Kufr Qassem Deaf Community: Language Emergence, Variation, Change, and Persistence.

I dedicate this thesis to my people: the resilient Palestinian people

Iconic Words Are Associated With Iconic Gestures Iconicity ratings studies have established that there are many English words which native speakers judge as “iconic,” that is, as sounding like what they mean. Here, we explore whether these iconic E...

Super excited to share our new multimodal corpus analysis, "Iconic Words Are Associated With Iconic Gestures" 🥳

Project led by our PhD student Ell Wilding and in collab w/ @jeannettel.bsky.social & @mperlman.bsky.social:

doi.org/10.1111/cogs...

And it comes together with a reply! It was an interesting and fruitful discussion about the iconicity of different type of r-sounds :)

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Not just the alveolar trill, but all “r-like” sounds are associated with roughness across languages, pointing to a more general link between sound and touch - Scientific Reports Scientific Reports - Not just the alveolar trill, but all “r-like” sounds are associated with roughness across languages, pointing to a more general link between sound and touch

Remember the cool finding by @bodowinter.bsky.social et al. that the "trilled r" [r] is associated with roughness? Well, Rémi Anselme, François Pellegrino (@laboratoireddl.bsky.social) & myself show in www.nature.com/articles/s41... that this seems more general and applies to all "r-like" sounds.

New review/theory/argumentative paper is out: "The size and shape of sound: The role of articulation and acoustics in iconicity and crossmodal correspondences".

The paper delves deeply into what phonetic and cognitive mechanisms underpin spoken language iconicity.

Link: doi.org/10.1121/10.0...

My latest article, "Vocal gestures in early multimodal communication: A commentary on Karadöller, Sümer and Özyürek", is now available to read in First Language. There is a paywall, but I can share the electronic version with anyone who needs it.

doi.org/10.1177/0142...

SLCVC2025 Conference - Call for papers Call for papers We are inviting abstracts on original research on any topic related to language contact/translanguaging, sociolinguistic variation, and language change in signing communities. All su...

Sign Language Contact, Variation, and Change 2025 conference at the University of Birmingham, UK: we are now inviting abstracts on any topic related to language contact/translanguaging, sociolinguistic variation, and language change in signing communities. sites.google.com/view/slcvc-w...

a picture of Torun old town in winter

JOB ALERT! Come work with me!
34-Month Postdoc Position here at the Center for Language Evolution Studies, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń in my project "Paths to Polysemy"
Job offer here: www.umk.pl/en/jobs/?tas...
Please repost & share widely!

A research poster titled 'Reference tracking, the use of space, and sociolinguistic ecologies in the Kufr Qassem and British signing communities' by Marah Jaraissy and colleagues from the University of Birmingham. The poster compares language structures in two deaf communities: Kufr Qassem (using KQSL/ISL) and British (using BSL). It explores the effects of social structure, language contact, and language age on semiotic diversity in storytelling. Key sections include: 1. Background: Discusses influences on language use, including community size, network density, and language contact, with simpler sign types used in smaller communities. 2. Methodology: Includes narrative retellings of a silent film clip by participants (12 bilingual KQSL/ISL signers and 12 BSL signers). 3. Results: Highlights differences in the use of lexical signs, pointing, classifier constructions, and overt constructed action between the two communities. Signers of KQSL/ISL use overt constructed action more, while BSL signers use more classifier constructions 4. Discussion and Conclusion: Links findings to social and linguistic factors, but also suggesting influences of methodology and researcher background. 5. Future Directions: Proposes studying referent's animacy and narrative viewpoints effects on storytelling Charts and diagrams provide data on sign type proportions, while logos and QR codes for references appear at the bottom."

Very much enjoyed presenting my poster at #TISLR15 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia today!

One important message in our poster is that factors like methodology, researcher's background, and language documentation may affect one's result.

Happy to share/discuss more via DM or Email!

Frontiers | The sociolinguistic foundations of language modeling

New paper out today in Frontiers in AI!

The sociolinguistic foundations of language modelling

We argue sociolinguistics provides a foundation for understanding LLMs and addressing many challenges

www.frontiersin.org/journals/art...

doi.org/10.3389/frai...

techxplore.com/news/2025-01...

I'm excited to see this study published in Gesture, led by @kirstyrgreen.bsky.social. We get deep into the nitty-gritty of infants' early production of iconic gestures.

From Birds to Words: Onomatopoeia, Metaphor, and the Language of Birdsong From Birds to Words: Onomatopoeia, Metaphor, and the Language of Birdsong - Professor Bodo Winter's Inaugural Lecture

‘From Birds to Words: Onomatopoeia, Metaphor, and the Language of Birdsong’

Please join us for the inaugural lecture of Professor
@bodowinter.bsky.social on Friday 21 February 2025 (16:00-17:00) in the Alan Walters Building, University of Birmingham.

Sound Symbolism in the Lexicon: A Review of Iconic‐Systematicity Sound symbolism refers to associations between language sounds (i.e., phonemes) and particular properties (e.g., certain shapes). For example, phonemes like /m/ are associated with roundness, while p....

Does sound symbolism show up in real language? Do real words for spiky things sound "spiky"? Words for small things sound "small"?

I'm excited to share this new review paper summarising the existing work by myself and many others on these questions!

compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

I made a starter pack of Iconicity Researchers!

Please message me if you’d like to be added, or have suggestions for anyone else who should be added!

go.bsky.app/C2F5iKC

People Can Create Iconic Vocalizations to Communicate Various Meanings to Naïve Listeners - Scientific Reports Scientific Reports - People Can Create Iconic Vocalizations to Communicate Various Meanings to Naïve Listeners

Oh yeah good call! I just saw comics and thought "Neil"^^
For unconventionalised onomatopoeia there's also cool work by @mperlman.bsky.social and Gary Lupyan
www.nature.com/articles/s41... and nice cross-cultural folllow up work by @acwiek.bsky.social et al
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Linguists, is there actually work on this kind of unconventionalized onomatopoeia? 🐦🐦

Doctoral Research Fellow (271220) | University of Oslo Job title: Doctoral Research Fellow (271220), Employer: University of Oslo, Deadline: Sunday, January 12, 2025

👩‍🎓👨‍🎓Fully funded PhD position available to come work with me at @unioslo.bsky.social using iterative learning experiments to understand the evolution of sound symbolism.

🔴 Deadline is 12. Jan '24
⏲️ Desired starting date is Mar/April '24

shorturl.at/7hLH0

The alveolar trill is perceived as jagged/rough by speakers of different languages Typological research shows that across languages, trilled [r] sounds are more common in adjectives describing rough as opposed to smooth surfaces. In this study

Move over bouba-kiki!

New study on crossmodal iconicity shows [r] = rough and [l] = smooth, even in langs that conflate them.

The results show "that speech sounds are not just acoustic objects, but they also have a texture and a shape to them".

#iconicity 🐦🐦

People around world associate rolled R with a jagged line, study finds Speakers of 28 languages linked sound and shape at least 88% of the time, in ‘strongest case of sound symbolism to date’

This is an interesting article - apparently it's crosslinguistically common to associate a trilled R sound with a jagged line shape. You've got to wonder if this kind of research could be relevant for writing system development...

www.theguardian.com/science/2024...

A screenshot of the article: Word of Mouth: Mouthing patterns in a bimodal multilingual deaf community. (Click on the link to read the abstract and the full article)

Hi BlueSky!

Check out our new paper on mouthing patterns in the bimodal multilingual deaf community of Kufr Qassem

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

The alveolar trill is perceived as jagged/rough by speakers of different languages Typological research shows that across languages, trilled [r] sounds are more common in adjectives describing rough as opposed to smooth surfaces. In this study

I'm excited to share our new study on cross-modal iconicity from our special issue in JASA! We show [r] is rough and [l] is smooth even in languages that conflate them within one phoneme. The effect is even stronger than the bouba/kiki effect!

People around world associate rolled R with a jagged line, study finds Speakers of 28 languages linked sound and shape at least 88% of the time, in ‘strongest case of sound symbolism to date’

This cool study by @acwiek.bsky.social, @susfuchs.bsky.social @mperlman.bsky.social @bodowinter.bsky.social and co-authors being reported by Guardian here:

www.theguardian.com/science/2024...

It's out—my new #openaccess paper with Bodo Winter in Cognitive Science (@cogscisociety.bsky.social) 🥳. Thread 👇 (1/11)
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

A siamang ape sings with mouth open wide and a large visible air sac showing. The image shows the tracking of the computer vision tool of this air sac and mouth opening together with a graph showing the sound and movements.

Our paper on tracking air sacs in siamang with wider applications for other animals is now out! journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

With sound (WARNING: siamang are loud!)! wimpouw.com/videos/air_s...

Special thanks to Jaderpark Tierpark for allowing us to do the research: www.jaderpark.de/home.html

Vowel signatures in emotional interjections and nonlinguistic vocalizations expressing pain, disgust, and joy across languages In this comparative cross-linguistic study we test whether expressive interjections (words like ouch or yay) share similar vowel signatures across the world's l

"We show that across the globe, pain interjections feature a-like vowels and wide falling diphthongs (“ai” as in Ayyy! “aw” as in Ouch!), whereas disgust and joy interjections do not show robust vowel regularities that extend geographically."

pubs.aip.org/asa/jasa/art...

#linguistics