Meet Yaqian Borogjoon Bao, MECO collaborator from Inner Mongolia

Growing up in the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, Yaqian Borogjoon Bao first learned to read and write in the Traditional Mongolian script, a vertical writing system that is read from top to bottom. It wasn’t until she started to learn Chinese and English that she recognized how unique her first language was.

“It made me wonder why this script is so different, and what that means about how we process language,” says Bao. 

Bao left her rural community and moved to Beijing to pursue a Master’s in Psycholinguistics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, where she was introduced to eye-tracking. Carrying out and publishing her first study on the cognitive aspects of Traditional Mongolian reading gave her even more questions to think about.

“I wanted to understand what aspects of reading are universal, and what’s unique to each language.”

That’s when Bao joined collaborators from over 40 countries to work on the Multilingual Eye-movement Corpus (MECO) and build a cross-linguistic eye-movement dataset. Supervised by Victor Kuperman, Bao continued her research as a PhD student in McMaster University’s Cognitive Science of Language program.

With international partners, Bao collected and analyzed eye-tracking data from university students in her home community, adding the first vertically written language to MECO.

“We compared reading in Traditional Mongolian with reading in 30 other languages collected in MECO,” explains Bao. “We found that Traditional Mongolian readers spend more time reading a text, but they don’t go back to re-read parts of a text as much as readers of other languages. This strategy suggests that reading direction shapes our cognitive processing.”

Bao hopes that her findings will have practical applications, like tailoring educational tools to diverse reading populations. Her work was recently published in Scientific Data and was recognized at the 2024 European Conference on Eye Movements with the Keith Rayner Memorial Award for Best Oral Presentation.

“MECO gave me the framework and support to conduct rigorous research in my own heritage language, and to bring attention to a unique writing system,” Bao says. “I hope it will inspire others to explore understudied languages and scripts.”