Chuck Bradley, PhD

About

Hi, I'm Chuck. I create science-backed brand names, architectures and strategies for Fortune 500 companies and world-class startups. My passion lies at the intersection of brand strategy, consumer insights, and linguistics, where I ideate from a unique cognitive perspective: By tapping into how the brain creates and processes structure in language, imagery and just about everything else, I believe we can predict how consumers will subconciously approach brands and use these insights to build appropriate strategies.

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I was most recently a linguist and researcher at Lexicon Branding Inc., a world-leading brand strategy and brand naming agency in sunny Sausalito, California. My job involves thinking deeply about how brand names will sound in different language markets (e.g., Will "AmerisourceBergen" be pronounced equally well in Arabic, Japanese and Turkish? Answer: no way ), assessing the international community's cultural and embodied relationships to names (e.g., Why would "4th Generation" be a fatal brand name in China? Answer: "Four" and "Die" sound similar in Mandarin), and figuring out how/why people have positive (or negative) associations with completely made-up names (e.g., Why does "Moniker" give French speakers pause? Answer: It sounds like the word niquer ("to fuck")). To these ends, I apply both experimental and computational methods.

I also lead Lexicon's consumer research, where I develop, deploy, and analyze custom consumer surveys to assess the "Day 0" brand equity a brand name inately carries. I have also helped clients quantitatively reorganize their brand architectures, pick the right product descriptor (Is 'Pro' more premium than 'Plus'?), and define their consumer base. Finally, I help clients define their brand identity through meticulous brand landscape research, align creative copy with company values through qualitative interviews, and build product roadmaps through co-creation and ideation sessions.

I earned my PhD in Linguistics from Purdue University, where I studied with Ronnie Wilbur in the Sign Language and Linguistics Lab. My PhD work focused on the emergence of grammar in language via iconicity, or, a motivated connection between how a word (or sign or gesture) looks or sounds like and what it means. My dissertations explores visual features that guide the interpretation of signs and gestures in novel communication settings, like when a Deaf signer and a hearing non-signer must communicate. Think: Would you cup your hands to order another beer at the bar? (Answer: No way and no sign language does this either). By applying modified linguistic tests to silent gesture, my goal is to characterize how structure arises in developing sign languages and make inferences about how language emerged in humans.

Prior to that, I focused on linguistic constraints on how movement is used in ASL, making critical comparisons between information available in depicting constructions in American Sign Language and information available in drawings, maps, and gesturing. Think: Can you guide someone to the nearest bus station without using your hands?

In my free time, I'm still picking at outstanding puzzles surrounding how language emerges in the visual modality (early sign languages). See Publications below to see what I've been up to. Riding my bike and tending to my small but mighty garden make me happy. In rainier months, I burn through classic and world cinema with my cat, Win-Win.

Here are just some of the brands I've worked with:

(Updated: January 2024)

Portfolio

Output

Professional writing, Blog posts

Mobility as a Service Creates Significant Branding Opportunities
Bradley, C. and Hauk, B. (Ignore the by-lines on the blog posts as shown online. It is company policy to assign authorship credit to the CEO.)

Contributions to science, Publications

Karabüklü; S., Wood, S.; Bradley; Wilbur, R. B.; Malaia, E. (2025). Effect of sign language learning on temporal resolution of visual attention. Journal of Visionhttps://doi.org/10.1167/jov.25.1.3

Bradley, C., Wilbur, R. B. (2023). Visual form and event semantics predict transitivity in pantomimed actions: Evidence for compositionality. Cognitive Science, 47: e13331 [article ↗] [project on GitHub ↗]

Bradley, C., Malaia, E., Siskind, J. M. and R. B. Wilbur. (2022) Visual form of ASL verb signs predicts non-signer judgment of transitivity. PLOS One 17(2): e0262098. [article ↗]

Bradley, C. Structural Iconicity in Silent Gesture. In Kimmelman, V. and Sze, F. (Eds.) Formal and Experimental Advances in Sign Language Theory, Vol. 4, p. 38–49, doi:10.31009/FEAST.i4.12. [pdf ↗]

Contributions to science, Presentations

Bradley, C. (2022). Compositionality in ‘Holistic’ Pantomime Characterizes a Gesture-First Proto-Language. Talk given at Expression, Language, Music 1 (August 20–22, 2022)

Bradley, C. (2021) Top-down and bottom-up sources of meaning in silent gesture. Talk presented at AMLaP2021 (September 2–4, 2021) [abstract ↗] [youtube].

Bradley, C. (2021) Measuring encyclopedic content in silent gesture: Gesture not as vague as once thought. Poster presented at AMLaP2021 (September 2–4, 2021). [abstract ↗]

Bradley, C. (2021). Structural iconicity in silent gesture. Poster presented at the FEAST 2021. Hong Kong. June, 2021. [abstract ↗]

Bradley, C. (2021). Systematicity in gesture production, perception may support sign language emergence. Poster presented at the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing 34. Philadelphia, PA, USA. March, 2021. [abstract ↗]

Bradley, C. (2020). Evidence for argument structure in the form of pantomime. Poster presented at Experiments in Linguistic Meaning 1. Philadelphia, PA, USA. September, 2020.

Bradley, C. (2020). Evidence for subunit structure when gesturers communicate in/transitive actions. Poster presented at the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing 33. Amherst, MA, USA. [abstract ↗]

Bradley, C. (2018) Can formal features be predicted from form? Using Machine Learning to predict transitivity class from the form of pantomime and ASL classifier constructions. Poster presented at Formal and Experimental Advances in Sign Language Theory 7. Venice, IT. [abstract ↗]

Bradley, C., Siskind, J.M., and R. Wilbur. (2017) Neural representation of minimal syntactic units. Poster presented at Cognitive Computational Neuroscience 1. New York, NY, USA. [abstract ↗]

Bradley, C. and H. Nassar. (2017) Rapid processing of ELAN data: quick and dirty numbers for statistical analysis. Poster presented at Formal and Experimental Approaches to Sign Language Theory 6. Reykjavik, Iceland. [abstract ↗]

Bradley, C. and V. Lee-Shoenfeld. (2010) A theoretical look at the Person Agreement Marker in German Sign Language. Poster presented at Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research 10. West Lafayette, IN, USA.

Theses

Bradley, C. (2019). Transparency of transitivity in pantomime, sign language [Full ↗] [ Summary]

Bradley, C. (2013). Motion events and event segmentation in American Sign Language [Full ↗] [ Summary]

Bradley, C. (2009). A theoretical look at the Person Agreement Marker in German Sign Language. [ Summary]