New data on text reading in English as a second language: the wave 2 expansion of the multilingual eye movements corpus (MECO)

Abstract

This paper reports an expansion of the English as a Second Language (L2) component of the Multilingual Eye Movement Corpus (MECO L2), an international database of eye movements during text reading. While the previous Wave 1 of the MECO project (Kuperman et al., 2023) contained English L2 reading data from readers with 12 different L1 backgrounds, the newly collected dataset adds eye-tracking data on English text reading from 13 distinct first-language (L1) backgrounds (N = 661), as well as participants’ scores on component skills of English proficiency and information about their demographics and language background and use. The paper reports reliability estimates, descriptive statistics, and correlational analyses, as means to validate the expansion dataset. Consistent with prior literature and MECO’s Wave 1, trends in the MECO Wave 2 data include a weak correlation between reading comprehension and oculomotor measures of reading fluency, and a greater L1-L2 contrast in reading fluency than reading comprehension. Jointly with Wave 1, the MECO project includes English reading data from more than 1200 readers representing a diversity of native writing systems (logographic, abjad, abugida, alphabetic) and 19 distinct L1 backgrounds. We provide multiple pointers to new venues of how L2 reading researchers can mine this rich publicly available dataset.

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