TECO: An Eye-tracking Corpus of Japanese L2 English Learners’ Text Reading (Study Accepted for Research Methods in Applied Linguistics)

This study introduces Tsukuba Eye-tracking Corpus (TECO), a dataset of eye-tracking records from Japanese L2 English learners engaged in text reading. TECO encompasses eye-tracking data for over 410,000 tokens, collected from 41 Japanese students who each read 30 English passages ranging in length from 300–400 words. In this article, we detail the design of TECO and report on the reliability of commonly used eye-tracking measures (e.g., skipping, first fixation duration, and regression) along with their descriptive statistics and distribution. We also validate the corpus by illustrating the impact of several lexical and reader factors (e.g., word length and reading proficiency) on some eye-tracking measures. TECO will serve as a valuable resource for researchers who are keen on exploring the cognitive processes involved in L2 reading.

本研究引入了茨城眼动数据集（Tsukuba Eye-tracking Corpus，简称 TECO），该数据集包含了日本二语英语学习者在文本阅读过程中的眼动记录。TECO 包含了超过 41 万个 Token 的眼动数据，这些数据来自 41 名日本学生，他们各自阅读了 30 篇长度在 300-400 词之间的英文短文。在本文中，我们详细阐述了 TECO 的设计，并报告了常用眼动指标（例如跳读、首次注视时长和回退）的可靠性及其描述性统计和分布情况。此外，我们还通过展示词汇和读者因素（例如单词长度和阅读能力）对某些眼动指标的影响，验证了该语料库的有效性。TECO 将成为研究者在探索二语阅读中的认知过程时的重要参考资料。