Presenting GECO: An Eye-tracking Corpus of Monolingual and Bilingual Sentence Reading.

This paper introduces GECO, the Ghent Eye-tracking Corpus, a monolingual and bilingual corpus of eye-tracking data of participants reading a complete novel. English monolinguals and Dutch-English bilinguals read an entire novel, which was presented in paragraphs on the screen. The bilinguals read half of the novel in their first language, and the other half in their second language. In this paper we describe the distributions and descriptive statistics of the most important reading time measures for the two groups of participants. This large eye-tracking corpus is perfectly suited for both exploratory purposes as well as more directed hypothesis testing, and it can guide the formulation of ideas and theories about naturalistic reading processes in a meaningful context. Most importantly, this corpus has the potential to evaluate the generalizability of monolingual and bilingual language theories and models to reading of long texts and narratives.

Cop, U., Dirix, N., Drieghe, D., & Duyck, W. (in press). Presenting GECO: An Eye-tracking Corpus of Monolingual and Bilingual Sentence Reading. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments & Computers. PDF available here