Native Language Prediction from Gaze: a Reproducibility Study

Numerous studies found that the linguistic properties of a person’s native language affect the cognitive processing of other languages. However, only one study has shown that it was possible to identify the native language based on eye-tracking records of natural L2 reading using machine learning. A new corpus allows us to replicate these results on a more interrelated and larger set of native languages. Our results show that comparable classification performance is maintained despite using less data. However, analysis shows that the correlation between L2 eye movements and native language similarity may be more complex than the original study found.