EyeReadIt: A Developmental Eye-Tracking Corpus of Text Reading in Italian

Large corpora of eye movement data have been instrumental in advancing our understandingof the cognitive processes involved in reading. We contribute to this body of literature by addressing an important gap – developing readers. We present an eye movement database collected from a large sample of Italian 3rd to 6th graders (N=141), along with a control group of skilled adult readers (N=33), as they silently read excerpts from kids’ books for comprehension. We also report a series of data validation analyses that successfully capture the developmental changes in eye movement behaviour during reading as children progress to become skilled readers. Additionally, these analyses replicate the benchmark effects of word length and frequency within the context of our ecologically valid reading paradigm. The database includes fixation, saccade and interest area reports for 1566 (762 unique types) words, and is freely available to the research community.