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The Beijing Sentence Corpus: A Chinese sentence corpus with eye movement data and predictability norms

Behavior Research Methods (2021)Cite this article

Abstract

This report introduces the Beijing Sentence Corpus (BSC). This is a Chinese sentence corpus of eye-tracking data with relatively clear word boundaries. In addition, we report predictability norms for each word in the corpus. Eye movement corpora are available in alphabetic scripts such as English, German, and French. However, there is no publicly available corpus for Chinese. Thus, to study predictive processes during reading in Chinese, it is necessary to establish such a corpus. Also, given the clear word boundaries in the sentences, BSC is especially useful to provide evidence relevant to the theoretical debate of saccade target selection in Chinese. With the large-scale predictability norms, we conducted new analyses based on 60 BSC readers, testing the influences of launch word and target word properties while controlling for visual and oculomotor constraints, as well as sentence and subject-level individual differences. We discuss implications for guidance of eye movements in Chinese reading.

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Fig. 1

Data availability

The BSC is available publicly from the Open Science Framework. Two files can be found and downloaded from this link: https://osf.io/vr3k8/. The file BSC.Word.Info.xlsx is a text file that provides relevant linguistic information as described in Table 3, most critically including the predictability norms. The other file, BSC.EMD.zip, contains the aforementioned eye-tracking data from 60 native readers of Chinese.

Notes

  1. This information was acquired via personal communication with the corresponding author.

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Author Note

E21 Humanities and Social Sciences Building, Avenida da Universidade, Taipa, Macau. The authors thank Yingyi Luo for her assistance in checking materials. This research was supported by a Multi-Year Research Grant from the University of Macau (MYRG2020-00120-FSS). Early empirical results were initially presented at the 6th China International Conference on Eye Movements (Kliegl, 2014).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Jinger Pan

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Macau, Macau, China

    Ming Yan

  3. Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, University of Macau, Macau, China

    Ming Yan

  4. Department of Psychology and Ergonomics, Technical University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Eike M. Richter

  5. Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China

    Hua Shu

  6. Department of Psychology, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

    Reinhold Kliegl

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  1. Jinger Pan
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Correspondence to Ming Yan.

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Pan, J., Yan, M., Richter, E.M. et al. The Beijing Sentence Corpus: A Chinese sentence corpus with eye movement data and predictability norms. Behav Res (2021). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-021-01730-2

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Keywords

  • Corpus analysis
  • Eye tracking
  • Chinese reading
  • Predictability