Expanding horizons of cross-linguistic research on reading: The Multilingual Eye-movement Corpus (MECO)

Date

2022-02-01

Author

Siegelman, Noam
Schroeder, Sascha
Acartürk, Cengiz
Ahn, Hee-Don
Alexeeva, Svetlana
Amenta, Simona
Bertram, Raymond
Bonandrini, Rolando
Brysbaert, Marc
Chernova, Daria
Da Fonseca, Sara Maria
Dirix, Nicolas
Duyck, Wouter
Fella, Argyro
Frost, Ram
Gattei, Carolina A.
Kalaitzi, Areti
Kwon, Nayoung
Loo, Kaidi
Marelli, Marco
Papadopoulos, Timothy C.
Protopapas, Athanassios
Savo, Satu
Shalom, Diego E.
Slioussar, Natalia
Stein, Roni
Sui, Longjiao
Taboh, Anali
Tonnesen, Veronica
Usal, Kerem Alp
Kuperman, Victor

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Scientific studies of language behavior need to grapple with a large diversity of languages in the world and, for reading, a further variability in writing systems. Yet, the ability to form meaningful theories of reading is contingent on the availability of cross-linguistic behavioral data. This paper offers new insights into aspects of reading behavior that are shared and those that vary systematically across languages through an investigation of eye-tracking data from 13 languages recorded during text reading. We begin with reporting a bibliometric analysis of eye-tracking studies showing that the current empirical base is insufficient for cross-linguistic comparisons. We respond to this empirical lacuna by presenting the Multilingual Eye-Movement Corpus (MECO), the product of an international multi-lab collaboration. We examine which behavioral indices differentiate between reading in written languages, and which measures are stable across languages. One of the findings is that readers of different languages vary considerably in their skipping rate (i.e., the likelihood of not fixating on a word even once) and that this variability is explained by cross-linguistic differences in word length distributions. In contrast, if readers do not skip a word, they tend to spend a similar average time viewing it. We outline the implications of these findings for theories of reading. We also describe prospective uses of the publicly available MECO data, and its further development plans.

Subject Keywords

Reading, Eye tracking, Cross-linguistic research, Language, WORD, ENGLISH, FREQUENCY, PREDICTABILITY, ACQUISITION, EXPERIENCE, SOFTWARE, GERMAN, SYSTEM, LENGTH

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/96044

Journal

BEHAVIOR RESEARCH METHODS

DOI

https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-021-01772-6

Collections

Graduate School of Informatics, Article

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Citation Formats

N. Siegelman et al., “Expanding horizons of cross-linguistic research on reading: The Multilingual Eye-movement Corpus (MECO),” BEHAVIOR RESEARCH METHODS, pp. 0–0, 2022, Accessed: 00, 2022. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/96044.