Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We introduce the LARC-ID, a pilot corpus of eye-movements obtained from subjects reading texts from a range of genres. Materials were presented in multiple paragraphs on the screen to more closely match naturalistic reading environments. Readers were encouraged to read for comprehension and enjoyment, engaging in various kinds of comprehension questions, including an open-ended reflection at the end of each text. Subjects also participated in a battery of individual difference measures, including those known to predict reading behavior in controlled experimental contexts, e.g., Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN; Denckla & Rudel, 1976), the author recognition (ART; Stanovich & West, 1989), and reading span (RSpan; Daneman & Carpenter, 1980) tasks. In addition to describing the central properties of the text and relationships between tasks in the battery, we present a sample analysis exploring how intrinsic lexical characteristics (length, frequency, and morphological complexity) interact with selected individual difference measures. The analysis provides the very first glimpse into what we hope will become a useful resource for reading researchers and educators. The entire corpus is freely available for unrestricted use.