Victor Kuperman discusses eye movement control through a multilingual lens at the University of Turku

Earlier this month at the University of Turku, Victor Kuperman (McMaster University) highlighted how cross-linguistic comparisons provided by the MECO data can further our understanding of eye movement control during reading. Read the abstract below:

The research field studying eye movement control during reading has benefited immensely from the series of comprehensive reviews that summarized the state of the field over three decades. One aspect of the seminal contribution by Keith Rayner was to author three authoritative reviews that codify and synthesize the factual base of this field (Rayner, 1978, 1998, 2009). This talk taps into two trends that either emerged or strengthened since the last review (Rayner, 2009) – the proliferation of eye movement corpora and the increasing emphasis on multilingual research and cross-linguistic comparisons. The project that straddles both trends is the Multilingual Eye Movement Corpus (MECO, Siegelman et al., 2022, 2025), a collection of eye-tracking data on text reading from 27 samples of 23 distinct languages. This talk analyzes the MECO data. The empirical goal of the talk is to test a selection of basic facts about eye movements during reading (summarized in Rayner’s reviews) against a large variety of written languages and determine whether these basic facts hold across this variety. The theoretical goal is to promote the research program into universal vs language-specific mechanisms of reading behavior. I will present a range of well-established behavioral phenomena as quotations from Rayner’s reviews and follow up with their detailed cross-linguistic analysis. The phenomena include return sweeps, refixations, and correlations between properties of saccades and fixations.