Russian Sentence Corpus: Benchmark measures of eye movements in reading in Russian

• Published in: Behavior research methods 2019-06, Vol.51 (3), p.1161-1178
• Main Authors: Laurinavichyute, Anna K., Sekerina, Irina A., Alexeeva, Svetlana, Bagdasaryan, Kristine, Kliegl, Reinhold
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Behavioral Science and Psychology; Benchmarks; Cognitive Psychology; Eye movements; Motor skill; Psychology
• ISSN: 1554-3528; 1554-3528
• DOI: 10.3758/s13428-018-1051-6

This article introduces a new corpus of eye movements in silent reading—the Russian Sentence Corpus (RSC). Russian uses the Cyrillic script, which has not yet been investigated in cross-linguistic eye movement research. As in every language studied so far, we confirmed the expected effects of low-level parameters, such as word length, frequency, and predictability, on the eye movements of skilled Russian readers. These findings allow us to add Slavic languages using Cyrillic script (exemplified by Russian) to the growing number of languages with different orthographies, ranging from the Roman-based European languages to logographic Asian ones, whose basic eye movement benchmarks conform to the universal comparative science of reading (Share, 2008 ). We additionally report basic descriptive corpus statistics and three exploratory investigations of the effects of Russian morphology on the basic eye movement measures, which illustrate the kinds of questions that researchers can answer using the RSC. The annotated corpus is freely available from its project page at the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/x5q2r/ .