Eye-Tracking Research in Kazakhstan: A Socio- and Psycholinguistic Analysis of Advertising Texts

Abstract

Eye tracking is increasingly gaining ground in Kazakhstani science as an interdisciplinary research method applied in neuromarketing, usability testing, clinical sciences, and psycholinguistics. This article presents a review of Kazakhstani empirical studies that use eye movement registration (eye tracking) or gaze direction measurement (eye gaze) as the primary or auxiliary method and reports an original sociolinguistic and neurolinguistic experiment on the perception of advertising texts. Publications for the review were selected based on the availability of a DOI, the use of eye tracking or gaze video-coding, and a connection of the authors or the study site to Kazakhstan. The review shows that the method is most consistently developed along three lines: the neuromarketing research programme of Almaty Management University, combining eye tracking, facial expression analysis, and machine learning; the Nazarbayev University research on gaze duration in children with autism spectrum disorder during robot-assisted therapy; and the MECO-KZ linguistic project launched in 2025–2026, which integrates the Kazakh language into the international corpus of eye movements during reading. A joint experiment by Almaty Management University and the A. Baitursynuly Institute of Linguistics, based on five Kazakhstani advertising banners (Samal Water, Coca-Cola, Colab.qz, e-Salyq, FlyArystan) with 15 respondents, shows that Kazakh-language text is in most cases perceived as the primary communicative element of an advertisement and is fixated earlier and longer than Russian- or English-language text, forming a stable linguistic hierarchy of perception. The review demonstrates the methodological potential accumulated in the country and substantiates the promise of further integrating the neuromarketing, clinical, and psycholinguistic strands of eye-tracking research into a unified interdisciplinary field.

Keywords: eye tracking, MECO, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, advertising text, areas of interest (AOI).