Varghese Peter

Dr Varghese Peter joined the Discipline of Psychology in the School of Health and Behavioural sciences in March 2021. Prior to USC, he held academic positions at Western Sydney University and Macquarie University. Varghese completed his PhD at Macquarie University and his Bachelors and Masters degrees from University of Mysore, India.

Varghese’s primary research interest is on speech perception and language development in infants and children. He studies how various environmental and genetic factors influence language development. He is particularly interested in how external factors like quality of maternal input (infant directed speech) and bilingualism as well as internal (genetic) factors like risk factor for dyslexia affect the speech and language development. He uses both behavioural and electroencephalography (EEG) methods to answer these questions.

Varghese’s second area of research focuses on auditory perception and auditory cognition. He studies how the brain oscillations track linguistically relevant units in speech in infants, children and adults and their possible impairments (in dyslexia, developmental language impairments and hearing loss). He uses psychophysics, EEG and linear neural encoding models to investigate this.