Alexander Porto
Thesis: Iconicity and Systematicity in the Evolution of Communication Systems Across Modalities
The PhD thesis investigate how communicators establish meaningful signals to achieve shared goals. I propose two experiments to examine how people create vocal and graphical communication from scratch through real-time coordination. Study 1 uses a touchscreen synthesizer that models the human vocal tract, a novel, ecologically valid method to track iconicity and systematicity in language evolution. Study 2 examines how people translate rapidly-fading speech sounds into durable graphical forms. The proposed research will use iterated learning designs (where generations’ outputs become subsequent generations’ training inputs) to test how iconicity, systematicity, and compositionality shape communication across cultural transmission.
Biography:
I am an interdisciplinary scientist focusing on evolutionary pragmatics. I study how human signalling systems develop, stabilize, and evolve under coordination and learnability pressures, using interactive experiments. A significant part of my work seeks to integrate achievements in cognitive linguistics and philosophy of language into a unified framework for how we think about language evolution. I completed a BA in Psychology (Point Park University, 2015). I then studied at Leipzig University (2018-2020) in an interdisciplinary master’s program (M.Sc. Early Childhood Research), which was hosted between the Departments of Psychology, Philosophy, Empirical Classroom Research, and Clinical Psychology. Following the MSc, I was a pre-doctoral fellow at Leipzig University (2021-2022) and held a guest researcher position at the Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.Publications:
Porto, A., Huckle, N., Basalyga, A., Santiago, J., Kranjec., A. (2025). Glyph Norming: Human and Computational Measurements of Shape Angularity in Writing Systems. Behavior Research Methods. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-025 02682-7
Porto, A., Basalyga, A., Huckle, N., Santiago, J., Fein, E., Kranjec., A. (2024). Sound Symbolism Across Diverse Writing Systems. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3xc6659p.
Brar, P., Pienkos, L., Porto, A., Wood, H., Sarpal, D., Schreiber, J., Kalarchian, M., Kranjec, A. (2024). Methods and Models for Investigating Anomalous Experiences in Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders. Philosophical Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2024.2305232.
Porto, A. (2023). A Picture Theory of Symbolic Development in Early Childhood. Theory & Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1177/09593543231192973
Porto, A., Anderson, L., Kalinich, T., Deane, K. C., Vogel, L. C., Zebracki, K. (2019). Understanding transition for youth with spinal cord injury: Youth and caregiver perceptions. The Journal of Spinal Cord Medicine, 1-7. https://doi.org/10.1080/10790268.2019.1574437
Department of Linguistics and Communication
University of Birmingham
2026 Cohort
Supervisors:
Marcus Perlman
Bodo Winter