MultiplEYE: Enabling multilingual eye-tracking data collection for human and machine language processing research

Eye-tracking is a gold-standard method for studying reading and language comprehension, yet the field lacks large-scale, multilingual datasets collected under standardized and FAIR-compliant conditions. This preregistration describes a large-scale, international eye-tracking-while-reading study conducted across multiple testing sites as part of the COST Action MultiplEYE (CA21131). Participants from diverse linguistic backgrounds read short naturalistic texts while their eye movements are recorded using a harmonized experimental protocol. The stimulus materials consist of parallel texts across languages and genres, enabling systematic cross-linguistic comparisons of reading behavior as well as comparison across different text types and levels of complexity. In addition to the reading task and comprehension questions, demographic information is collected for all participants, and a subset of sites administers standardized psychometric tests assessing a range of cognitive and linguistic abilities. Data collection, preprocessing, quality control, and documentation follow jointly defined standards to ensure comparability and reproducibility across sites. The resulting multilingual corpus will be openly shared via EyeStore, a FAIR-compliant repository hosted by the Research Data Center at the Leibniz Institute for Psychology (RDC at ZPID), providing a sustainable resource for research in psychology, linguistics and machine learning.