Russian sentence corpus: Benchmark measures of eye movements in Reading in cyrillic

Abstract

We describe the Russian Sentence Corpus (RSC), which establishes benchmarks of eye movements in reading in Cyrillic. The RSC design follows the cross-linguistic protocol of the Potsdam Sentence Corpus for German (Kliegl et al., 2004). The RSC consists of 144 sentences including the target words of three parts of speech (nouns, verbs, and adjectives) and the corresponding eye-tracking while reading data from 96 young native speakers of Russian reading these sentences. The basic characteristics of eye movements while reading in Russian were described and compared to those of German. In general, the basic characteristics of eye movements were similar across languages, although Russian manifests systematic differences in the way word length affects reading times, which we tentatively attribute to the morphological structure of Russian words.