Rate My Professor Varghese Peter

Dr. Varghese Peter serves as a Lecturer in Psychology in the Discipline of Psychology within the School of Health at the University of the Sunshine Coast, having joined in March 2021. Previously, he held academic appointments at Western Sydney University and Macquarie University, where he obtained his PhD. He also earned his MSc and BSc from the University of Mysore, India. Peter's research focuses on speech perception and language development in infants and children, exploring the influence of environmental factors such as infant-directed speech and bilingualism, as well as genetic factors like dyslexia risk. He employs behavioral methods and electroencephalography (EEG) to investigate these processes. His secondary research area examines auditory perception and cognition, including how brain oscillations track linguistically relevant units in speech among infants, children, and adults, and impairments associated with dyslexia, developmental language disorders, and hearing loss. For this, he uses psychophysics, EEG, and linear neural encoding models.

Peter's key publications include 'Atypical cortical entrainment to speech in the right hemisphere underpins phonemic deficits in dyslexia' (NeuroImage, 2018), 'Infant-directed speech facilitates seven-month-old infants’ cortical tracking of speech' (Scientific Reports, 2018), 'Mature neural responses to Infant-Directed Speech but not Adult-Directed Speech in Pre-Verbal Infants' (Scientific Reports, 2016), 'Effect of deviance direction and calculation method on duration and frequency mismatch negativity (MMN)' (Neuroscience Letters, 2010), and 'Discrimination of stress in speech and music: A mismatch negativity (MMN) study' (Psychophysiology, 2012). His work has accumulated over 800 citations, demonstrating substantial influence in auditory neuroscience and developmental psychology. Awards include the Vice Chancellors Excellence in Research Interdisciplinary Group Award (special mention, Western Sydney University, 2020), Director of Research Award - Team Research (School of Social Sciences and Psychology, Western Sydney University, 2019), and a Travel Award from the Society for Neurobiology of Language (2009). He is an Editorial Board Member of BMC Psychology, a member of the Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and teaches Introduction to Psychology and Personality and Assessment.