Background: Occipito-temporal N170 component represents the first step where face, object and word processing are discriminated along the ventral stream of the brain. N170 leftward asymmetry observed during reading has been often associated to prelexical orthographic visual word form activation. However, some studies reported a lexical frequency effect for this component particularly during word repetition that appears in contradiction with this prelexical orthographic step. Here, we tested the hypothesis that under word repetition condition, discrimination between words would be operated on visual rather than orthographic basis. In this case, N170 activity may correspond to a logographic processing where a word is processed as a whole.