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 (Mage = 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.