The Eye Movement Database of Passage Reading in Vertically Written Traditional Mongolian

This paper introduces an eye-tracking corpus of passage reading data in the vertical writing system of traditional Mongolian. This corpus extends the Multilingual Eye Movement Corpus (MECO) database and includes data from 66 native readers of traditional Mongolian script reading 12 texts comprising 99 sentences and 2,592 words. This traditional Mongolian MECO corpus aims to address the research gap in reading studies on understudied languages. As one of the very few actively used vertical writing systems, these data offer unique insights into the cognitive and visual processing demands of vertical reading. The paper provides reliability estimates for the data and reports lexical benchmark effects of word frequency and length. Additionally, the corpus provides a valuable opportunity for cross-linguistic comparisons of eye movement data, especially with horizontal writing systems, contributing to a better understanding of how reading direction influences cognitive processing.