The Multilingual Eye-Movement Corpus (MECO): A Collection of Eye-Tracking Reading Data Worldwide

This article describes the Multilingual Eye-movement COrpus (MECO)—an international resource generation project aimed at collecting comparable eye-tracking reading data from different languages of the world and from participants with diverse language backgrounds. We describe the motivation behind the project and the publicly available MECO data, which currently includes more than 1200 participants from 27 testing sites. We emphasize specific features that make MECO a unique testbed for investigating eye-movement reading behavior in both participants' first language (L1) and in English as their second language (L2). We also highlight current limitations of the MECO data and, relatedly, its future expansion plans.