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Kohei Kanayama

Hokkaido University of Education, Japan

 

Akira Iwata

Hokkai-Gakuen University, Japan

 

Abstract
This study created Cartoon Word Lists (CWLs) for second language learning through extensive viewing of cartoons. We built the English Cartoon Corpus (ECC), consisting of 8,016,916 words from a total of 3,756 episodes streamed on Netflix. The ECC comprised four subcorpora grouped by recommended viewing age (i.e., toddlers, young children, older children, and adults). Then, the words that met the following three conditions were selected: (1) used 30 times or more per million words; (2) having a dispersion (Juilland’s D) value of 0.6 or higher; and (3) not listed in the 2,809 flemmas from the New General Service List version 1.2 (NGSL 1.2, Browne et al., 2024). This resulted in the extraction of 271, 266, 137, and 235 flemmas in the CWLs for Toddlers, Young Children, Older Children, and Adults, respectively. We calculated the lexical coverage in the scripts of other cartoons that were not included in the ECC. The results showed that the NGSL 1.2 alone covered over 90% of the corpus, while the addition of the CWLs increased coverage to over 95%, indicating a substantial gain in lexical coverage for cartoon viewing. 

 

Keywords
Word list, extensive cartoon viewing, audiovisual input, second language learning, lexical coverage

 

Supplementary Materials
The supplementary materials for this study can be downloaded here.