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

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 million)—taught in a child’s own classroom versus counterbalanced words taught in two other classrooms—elicited cortical responses nearly identical to those evoked by high-frequency words versus pseudowords. Furthermore, 1 Hz responses to new vocabulary learning was linked to individual differences in reading skills, including word decoding and rapid automatic naming. Together, these findings highlight the causal impact of authentic instruction and the value of neuroscience-informed methods in education research. © The Author(s) 2025.