Fixation-related potentials in naming speed: A combined EEG and eye-tracking study on children with dyslexia

Objective: We combined electroencephalography (EEG) and eye-tracking recordings to examine the underlying factors elicited during the serial Rapid-Automatized Naming (RAN) task that may differentiate between children with dyslexia (DYS) and chronological age controls (CAC).

Methods: Thirty children with DYS and 30 CAC (M_age = 9.79 years; age range 7.6 through 12.1 years) performed a set of serial RAN tasks. We extracted fixation-related potentials (FRPs) under phonologically similar (rime-confound) or visually similar (resembling lowercase letters) and dissimilar (non-confounding and discrete uppercase letters, respectively) control tasks.

Results: Results revealed significant differences in FRP amplitudes between DYS and CAC groups under the phonologically similar and phonologically non-confounding conditions. No differences were observed in the case of the visual conditions. Moreover, regression analysis showed that the average amplitude of the extracted components significantly predicted RAN performance.

Conclusion: FRPs capture neural components during the serial RAN task informative of differences between DYS and CAC and establish a relationship between neurocognitive processes during serial RAN and dyslexia.

Significance: We suggest our approach as a methodological model for the concurrent analysis of neurophysiological and eye-gaze data to decipher the role of RAN in reading.