We are extremely excited to share with you the first paper on the Multilingual Eye-Movements Corpus (MECO), out in Behavior Research Methods. This paper presents the first language component of the first wave of MECO (MECO-L1). It includes data from a total of 580 readers of 13 languages: Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Korean, Norwegian, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. A free version of the paper can be accessed for the next few weeks via this link, and after that, you can download the paper at the Journal’s website.
The main goal of this paper is to introduce the MECO-L1 data. We also report various descriptive statistics and reliability estimates to establish its quality. The other goal of the paper is to exemplify some of the cross-linguistic analyses made possible by MECO’s unique scope. The full details are in the paper, but in a nutshell, we show that there’s a lot of cross-linguistic variability in mean skipping behavior (the % of words not fixated even once), but surprisingly much cross-language similarity in the time spent reading words that are fixated. We also show that variance in skipping rates is very strongly predicted by mean word lengths in a language: Written languages with longer printed words have lower skipping rates than languages with shorter words.
This is a first official outcome in what we hope will be a long series of papers. In fact, our MECO-L2 paper (focusing on reading English as a second language) is now accepted and forthcoming in Studies in Second Language Acquisition (full details in this space soon!). The second wave of MECO is also already ongoing with multiple samples from several more languages. And of course, because all MECO data are fully available and open to the public, we are excited to see what you discover when you explore the MECO data. Check out the paper’s OSF page to access to full data.
As always, our sincere thanks go to our wonderful collaborators. The first wave of MECO had no centralized funding, so our partners’ contribution is a reflection of their passion for science and true generosity and collaborative spirit. This is only the beginning, but tonight, we are going to celebrate this exciting milestone!
Yours,
Noam and Victor