Steady-state EEG captures how elementary classroom instruction drives plasticity for novel visual words.

ABSTRACT: Early readers encounter thousands of printed words in children's books. The frequency with which they see each word shapes both neural and behavioral responses. Teachers also introduce novel written words through short, intensive learning experiences. Here we combined steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP), corpus-based word frequency counts, and a novel two-week classroom "learning sprint" to examine and compare these two forms of experience-dependent plasticity. Cortical responses at 4 Hz to contrasts between real words of varying frequency (high: on average 1000 per million; medium: on average 200 per million) and pseudowords were sensitive to corpus-based frequency estimates-marking the first such finding using SSVEP. Strikingly, newly acquired low-frequency words (<1 per millio

SUBMITTER: Wang F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12635053 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature