Linguistic and attentional factors – Not statistical regularities – Contribute to word-selective neural responses with FPVS-oddball paradigms

Word-selective EEG/MEG responses in the English language obtained with Fast Periodic Visual Stimulation (FPVS)

“…In addition to the dearth of FPVS word recognition studies in general, one recent study with ten participants encountered difficulties replicating the significant results of the original French paradigm in English (Barnes, Petit, Badcock, Whyte, & Woolgar, 2021). This could be due to linguistic differences between French and English, 5 or to different methodological choices (see Lochy et al, (2024), and discussion of the present study).…”

“…The oddball FPVS design (reviewed in Rossion, Retter, & Liu-Shuang, 2020) measures neural responses to a deviant category of stimuli as an index of a differential processing between base and deviant stimuli (i.e., all common processes between base and deviant stimuli project to the common base rate response, which can be also objectively identified in the EEG spectrum). This method has been widely used among children learning to read (de Ghelcke et al, 2020(de Ghelcke et al, , 2021Lochy, Van Reybroeck, & Rossion, 2016;Lutz et al, 2024;Wang et al, 2024;Wang et al, 2023), in developmental disorders (e.g., dyslexia (Lochy, Collette, Rossion, & Schiltz, submitted)), and in healthy populations to study automatic lexical recognition (Lochy et al, 2024;Lochy et al, 2015;Marchive, Rossion, & Lochy, submitted) or semantic discrimination (Volfart, Rice, Lambon Ralph, & Rossion, 2021).…”

“…The minimum difference in time between each colour change was 2 seconds. This task was chosen because it is orthogonal to the experimental manipulation (i.e., different types of letter strings), and has recently been shown to produce larger word-selective responses than a previously used central cross colourchange detection task (Lochy et al, 2024). Its purpose is to ensure that participants pay attention to the stimuli.…”

“…Our stimuli and experimental settings were close to those described in Lochy et al (2024). The stimuli consisted of 30 English high frequency nouns composed of five letters (frequency mean 81.79 per million ± 139.57) with an average of 3.4 (±2.69) orthographic neighbours and an average bigram frequency of 10335 (±3.259) calculated with Wordgen (Duyck, Desmet, Verbeke, & Brysbaert, 2004).…”

“…In the so-called oddball version of the paradigm, words are presented periodically (e.g., every five items) as deviants (oddballs) in streams of base stimuli (e.g., pseudowords) displayed at a certain frequency (e.g., 10Hz). If words are discriminated by the visual word recognition system from the base stimuli, then a word-selective response occurs exactly at the predefined oddball frequency (e.g., in base stimuli displayed at 10Hz, words occur at 10/5Hz, and responses are detectable at 2Hz (Lochy et al, 2024;Lochy et al, 2015)). Importantly, the wordselective response represents a measure of differential processing between base and oddball stimuli, and therefore in the case of words among pseudowords it reflects the neural response to words over and above the responses that words and pseudowords have in common.…”