Reading-Time Annotations for "Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese"

The Dundee Eyetracking Corpus contains eyetracking data collected while native speakers of English and French read newspaper editorial articles. Similar resources for other languages are still rare, especially for languages in which words are not overtly delimited with spaces. This is a report on a project to build an eyetracking corpus for Japanese. Measurements were collected while 24 native speakers of Japanese read excerpts from the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese Texts were presented with or without segmentation (i.e. with or without space at the boundaries between bunsetsu segmentations) and with two types of methodologies (eyetracking and self-paced reading presentation). Readers’ background information including vocabulary-size estimation and Japanese reading-span score were also collected. As an example of the possible uses for the corpus, we also report analyses investigating the phenomena of anti-locality.