MECO English as a second language (MECO L2) paper out in Studies in Second Language Acquisition

We are excited to share that the second paper from the Multilingual Eye-Movements Corpus (MECO) project is out in Studies in the Second Language Acquisition! This paper presents the English as a Second Language component of the first wave of MECO (MECO-L2). It includes English eye-movement reading data plus a test battery of component skills of English reading from a total of 543 participants who speak 12 first languages (L1s): Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Norwegian, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. The paper can be downloaded from the Journal’s website and a pre-print is available via ResearchGate.

We start the paper by introducing the design and structure of MECO L2, and providing reliability estimates and basic descriptive analyses. Then, we illustrate the utility of MECO L2 by focusing on one long-standing question in L2 reading research: What factors determine reading fluency and comprehension in a non-dominant language? Using the MECO L2 and the parallel MECO L1 data (available from the same participants), we quantify contributions of four sources to L2 reading proficiency proposed in prior literature: reading fluency and comprehension in L1, L2 component skills of reading, extralinguistic factors, and the L1 of the readers. Check out the paper for the full details; but, in short, we found that (a) there is a fundamental contrast between the factors predicting L2 reading fluency versus comprehension accuracy, and (b) participants are highly consistent in their real-time strategy of reading in L1 and L2.

As always, all materials and data are available to the public. You can download the eye-tracking and individual-differences data from MECO L2’s release page on OSF. Plus, as we did in our paper, you can use the MECO L2 data in conjunction with the MECO L1 data available on the same participants. We are looking forward to hearing about your findings with the MECO data. Of course, you can always contact us if you encounter any issues or have any questions about MECO resources.

Yours,

Noam and Victor