For decreasing intersymbol interference (ISI) due to band-limited channels in digitalcommunication, the uses of equalization techniques are necessary. Among the useful adaptive equalization techniques, because of their ease of implementation and nonlinear capabilites, the neural networks have been used as an alternative for effectively dealing with the channel distortion. In this paepr, a complex-valued multilayer percepron is proposed as a nonlinear adaptive equalizer. After the important properties that a suitable complex-valued activation function must possess are discussed, a new complex-valued activation function is developed for the proposed schemes to deal with M-ary QAM signals of any constellation sizes. It has been further proven that by the nonlinear transformation of the proposed function, the correlation coefficient between the real and imaginary parts of input data decreases when they are jointly Gaussian random variables. Lastly, the effectiveness of the proposed scheme is demonstrated by simulations. The proposed scheme provides, compared with the linear equalizer using the least mean squares (LMS) algorith, an interesting improvement concerning Bit Error Rate (BER) when channel distortions are nonlinear.