This article introduces GECO, the Ghent EyeTracking Corpus, a monolingual and bilingual corpus of the eyetracking data of participants reading a complete novel. English monolinguals and Dutch-English bilinguals read an entire novel, which was presented in paragraphs on the screen. The bilinguals read half of the novel in their first language, and the other half in their second language. In this article, we describe the distributions and descriptive statistics of the most important reading time measures for the two groups of participants. This large eyetracking corpus is perfectly suited for both exploratory purposes and more directed hypothesis testing, and it can guide the formulation of ideas and theories about naturalistic reading processes in a meaningful context. Most importantly, this corpus has the potential to evaluate the generalizability of monolingual and bilingual language theories and models to the reading of long texts and narratives. The corpus is freely available at http://expsy.ugent.be/downloads/ geco.Keywords Bilingualism . Reading . Eyetracking . Corpus study Over the years, linguistic data gathered in experimental settings have driven the development of ideas and theories about the cognitive processes involved in language performance. Usually, these experiments are designed to test one or more specific hypotheses and use a meticulously selected and restricted stimulus set, containing one or more, often orthogonal, experimental manipulations. More recently, with the development of larger, and more complex, computational-reading models that operate on multiple processing levels and/or cover a wide range of phenomena (e.g.,

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This study examined how noun reading by bilinguals is influenced by orthographic similarity with their translation equivalents in another language. Eye movements of DutchEnglish bilinguals reading an entire novel in L1 and L2 were analyzed.In L2, we found a facilitatory effect of orthographic overlap. Additional facilitation for identical cognates was found for later eye movement measures. This shows that the complex, semantic context of a novel does not eliminate cross-lingual activation in natural reading.In L1 we detected non-identical cognate facilitation for first fixation durations of longer nouns. Identical cognate facilitation was found on total reading times for high frequent nouns. This study is the first to show cognate facilitation in L1 reading of narrative text. This shows that even when reading a novel in the mother tongue, lexical access is not restricted to the target language.

The present study assessed intra- and cross-lingual neighborhood effects, using both a generalized lexical decision task and an analysis of a large-scale bilingual eye-tracking corpus (Cop, Dirix, Drieghe, & Duyck, 2016). Using new neighborhood density and frequency measures, the general lexical decision task yielded an inhibitory cross-lingual neighborhood density effect on reading times of second language words, replicating van Heuven, Dijkstra, and Grainger (1998). Reaction times for native language words were not influenced by neighborhood density or frequency but error rates showed cross-lingual neighborhood effects depending on target word frequency. The large-scale eye movement corpus confirmed effects of cross-lingual neighborhood on natural reading, even though participants were reading a novel in a unilingual context. Especially second language reading and to a lesser extent native language reading were influenced by lexical candidates from the nontarget language, although these effects in natural reading were largely facilitatory. These results offer strong and direct support for bilingual word recognition models that assume language-independent lexical access. (PsycINFO Database Record

In this study, we investigated how eye movements are influenced by different text reading goals in participants' first and second language (L1, L2). Participants had to read or study the contents of texts while their eye movements were recorded. One group was asked to read texts in L1 and L2 as they would read any expository text (informative reading). Another group was asked to study L1 and L2 texts for subsequent tests involving true/false questions (study condition). After reading, all participants (including those in the informative reading condition) completed the true/false tests without being able to further consult the texts. This allowed us to investigate to what extent reading goal and text language affect recognition memory for texts. In general, more reading time was spent on studying than on informative reading, which also resulted in higher test scores in the study condition. The L2 processing cost was larger in the study condition than in the informative reading condition: participants needed about 20% more time to study L2 texts. The results of various eye movement measures suggest that this is caused by slower word recognition processes and a smaller amount of information that can be processed simultaneously in L2. This was true not only for the first reading of the text, but also for the rereadings in the study condition. Interestingly, the additional time for L2 studying seemed to compensate for the less efficient processing, as the recognition test scores were the same in L2 as in L1.

In the present study we assessed the extent to which different word recognition time measures converge, using large databases of lexical decision times and eyetracking measures. We observed a low proportion of shared variance between these measures, which limits the validity of lexical decision times to real-life reading. We further investigated and compared the role of word frequency and length, two important predictors of word-processing latencies in these paradigms, and found that they influenced the measures to different extents. A second analysis of two different eyetracking corpora compared the eyetracking reading times for short paragraphs with those from reading of an entire book. Our results revealed that the correlations between eyetracking reading times of identical words in two different corpora are also low, suggesting that the higher-order language context in which words are presented plays a crucial role. Finally, our findings indicate that lexical decision times better resemble the average processing time of multiple presentations of the same word, across different language contexts.

In the present study, we investigated the effects of word-level age of acquisition (AoA) on natural reading. Previous studies, using multiple language modalities, showed that earlier-learned words are recognized, read, spoken, and responded to faster than words learned later in life. Until now, in visual word recognition the experimental materials were limited to single-word or sentence studies. We analyzed the data of the Ghent Eye-tracking Corpus (GECO; Cop, Dirix, Drieghe, & Duyck, in press), an eyetracking corpus of participants reading an entire novel, resulting in the first eye movement megastudy of AoA effects in natural reading. We found that the ages at which specific words were learned indeed influenced reading times, above other important (correlated) lexical variables, such as word frequency and length. Shorter fixations for earlier-learned words were consistently found throughout the reading process, in both early (single-fixation durations, first-fixation durations, gaze durations) and late (total reading times) measures. Implications for theoretical accounts of AoA effects and eye movements are discussed.