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

•Novel framework for integrative analysis of neurophysiological and eye-gaze data in examining young readers’ cognitive processes under serial rapid-automatized naming (RAN) tasks.•Fixation-Related Potentials during the serial RAN capture neural components that differentiate between children with dyslexia (DYS) and chronological age controls (CAC).•Differences between DYS and CAC groups were observed in the phonological but not in the RAN tasks’ visual conditions. 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). 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 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. 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. 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.