Mira Peter

Certified English Teacher (TESOL), Australia

Ph.D. in Experimental Psycholinguistics,University of Connecticut, USA

B.A. (Hons) in Clinical Psychology, University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia

Mira is a Senior Research Fellow in the Wilf Malcolm Institute of Educational Research and Te Kotahitanga Research Unit since 2010.

Mira is a highly trained and experienced human behaviour researcher with a background in the psychology of language and the ecological approach to human perception and action. With special skills in data analysis and statistics she is highly skilled at seeking the causes and sources behind data patterns. For over 20 years Mira has been actively involved in various research projects studying human language (i.e., speech perception and production, reading acquisition, and the role of phonology in reading processes). Most recently she was responsible for a nationally funded series of studies on human communication, language, gestures, and hemispheric laterality.

Currently Mira is involved in a number of research projects:

Threshold concepts in tertiary education;

Te Kotahitanga – Establishing a culturally responsive pedagogy of relations in mainstream school classrooms;

Survey of New Zealand Kindergarten Provision (NZKI);

Evaluation of Intensive Literacy and Numeracy Fund (ILNF);

Teachers’ use and perceptions of the New Zealand Science Learning Hub

Analysis of students’ NCEA achievement.

Selected Publications:

Peter, M., Lukatela, G., & Turvey, M. T. (1990). Phonological priming: Failure to replicate in the rapid naming task. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 28, 389-392.

Peter, M., & Turvey, M.T. (1994). Phonological codes are early sources of constraint in visual semantic categorisation. Perception & Psychophysics, 55, 497-504.

Pugh, K., Rexer, K., Peter, M., & Katz, L. (1994). Neighbourhood effects in visual word recognition: Effects of letter delay and nonword context difficulty. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 20, 639-648.

Katz, L., Rexer, K., & Peter, M. (1995). Case morphology and thematic role in word recognition. In L. Feldman (Ed.), Morphological Aspects of Language Processing(pp.79-107). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Carello, C., Lukatela, G., Peter, M., & Turvey, M.T. (1995). Effects of association, frequency, and stimulus quality on naming words in the presence or absence of pseudowords. Memory & Cognition, 23, 289-300.

Oney, B., Peter, M., & Katz, L. (1997). Phonological processing in printed word recognition: Effects of age and writing system. Scientific Studies of Reading, 1, 65-83.

Treffner, P. J., & Peter, M. (2002). Intentiontional and attentional dynamics of speech-hand coordination. Human Movement Science, 21, 641-697. PDF

Treffner, P. J., & Peter, M. (2003). Intention and attention in gestural coordination: Asymmetric HKB model. In S. Rogers and J. Effken (Eds.), Studies in perception and action VII (pp. 73-78). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. PDF

Treffner, P. J., Peter, M., & Kleidon, M. (2008). Gestures and phases: The dynamics of speech-hand communication. Ecological Psychology, 20, 32-64. PDF

View the animations and try the gestures experiment: metaffordance.com