We know – it’s been a while since you last heard from us. But it wasn’t because we weren’t busy. So, for all of you out there who are curious to hear about the state of the Multilingual Eye-movement Corpus (MECO) – this post is for you.
We were fortunate to complete the vast majority of data collection for the first wave of MECO *just* before the pandemic hit (March, 2020). By that time, the first wave of the project included samples from 12 countries and languages, with data from readers of Dutch, English, Finnish, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Korean, Norwegian, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. Since then, one more site joined the first wave of the project – with a sample of Estonian readers joining the mix – bringing the total number of languages in the first MECO wave to 13. Over the past year or so, we kept busy writing two manuscripts that present MECO and report new analyses made possible thanks to the scope of the project: One paper focuses on the first language (L1) reading data, and the second paper on reading in English as a second language (L2). Although we faced some obstacles along the way (buy us a beer and we will tell you all about challenges in publishing multi-site collaborations!), we are glad to report that both papers are now revised and will be resubmitted very soon. Upon acceptance of the papers, we will launch the official and public release of MECO data. As we hope to hear back from journals soon, make sure to check back this space. You can also subscribe for updates – we will let you know as soon as the data are officially released!
In the summer and fall of 2021, as labs are slowly returning from long COVID shutdowns, we are also re-launching extensions of MECO data collection, with our eyes towards a second (and a third, and a fourth) MECO waves. Multiple labs are at different stages of data collection, with at least some data collected on readers of Russian (a replication sample to the one from the first wave), traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese, Basque, and Slovenian. Fingers crossed that more sites will restart data collection soon, when it is safe to do so in their countries. If you want to be part of future waves of MECO, contact us!
Lastly, we are happy to announce the first spin-off project that grew out of the MECO network, called ENRO (ENglish Reading Online). ENRO takes as its base the English as L2 reading portion of MECO, with additional tests of reading comprehension and component skills of English reading. All data are collected online, to promote the MECO idea of international collaboration without the need to physically collect data or have access to an eye-tracking device. So far, 28 labs, representing 24 languages from 21 countries, have started to collect data, and data from more than 3000 (!) participants already reached our servers. The planned date for the completion of data collection is January, 2022 – much like in MECO, when data collection is complete we will assemble the data from the various sites, write up a paper presenting ENRO as a resource, and release the full data to the public. We will provide more details on this exciting spin-off project soon – but you can always contact us if you want to hear more about it.
Needless to say, the last year and a half were not exactly optimal for resource generation projects involving in-person data collection, such as MECO. Yet, with the help and support of our incredible collaborators, MECO kept on going almost full steam ahead. We look forward to what’s to come, and hope that you will hear from us soon with the first official and public release of MECO data.
Noam & Victor
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