Learning English from Videogame Characters: Results from corpus data

Studies have shown that non- anglophone students greatly benefit from watching pop- cultural products such as films and videogames in English, as these support unsupervised language learning, and that scripted dialogue in films and in videogames both resemble spontaneous speech in many ways. But are there any lexico-grammatical features that a person is more likely to encounter, and consequently learn, when playing videogames compared to when watching films? To answer this question this study contrasts scripted dialogue in videogames to film dialogue and spontaneous interactions, at the level of part-of-speech categories. Results highlight a small set of features that are significantly more frequent in videogame scripted dialogue. Such features are mostly connected to the ludic aims of videogames.