One aspect of the invention provides a novel scheme to synchronize signal reception for a receiver device. In one embodiment, multi-symbol correlation of a first signal and a reference signal is performed. The reference signal corresponds to symbols denoting a synchronization or alignment marker. For every first signal sample, an indication of the degree of similarity between a plurality of the first signal symbols and reference signal symbols is generate as a second signal. This second signal is then nonlinearly processed, linearly processed, and then nonlinearly processed over time to determine if indications of high degrees of correlation occur at periodic intervals. If so, then these are considered synchronization markers and are used to synchronize signal reception of the receiver device.