The Natural Stories corpus: a reading-time corpus of English texts containing rare syntactic constructions

• Published in: Language resources and evaluation Vol. 55; no. 1; pp. 63 - 77
• Main Authors: Futrell, Richard, Gibson, Edward, Tily, Harry J., Blank, Idan, Vishnevetsky, Anastasia, Piantadosi, Steven T., Fedorenko, Evelina
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01-03-2021; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Audio data; Computational Linguistics; Computer Science; Computerized corpora; Corpus linguistics; English language; Language and Literature; Linguistics; Natural language processing; Original Paper; Quantitative psychology; Reading; Reading rate; Social Sciences; Syntactic structures; Texts; Psycholinguistics; Cognitive modeling; Reading time
• ISSN: 1574-020X; 1574-0218
• DOI: 10.1007/s10579-020-09503-7

It is now a common practice to compare models of human language processing by comparing how well they predict behavioral and neural measures of processing difficulty, such as reading times, on corpora of rich naturalistic linguistic materials. However, many of these corpora, which are based on naturally-occurring text, do not contain many of the low-frequency syntactic constructions that are often required to distinguish between processing theories. Here we describe a new corpus consisting of English texts edited to contain many low-frequency syntactic constructions while still sounding fluent to native speakers. The corpus is annotated with hand-corrected Penn Treebank-style parse trees and includes self-paced reading time data and aligned audio recordings. We give an overview of the content of the corpus, review recent work using the corpus, and release the data.