[Diagnosis of computer game addiction using a linguistic test]

To study the prevalence of computer game addiction in educational institutions and to develop additional diagnostics of computer game addiction using the vocabulary of colloquial speech of a computer gamer and the «portrait of a gamer student».

The study included 7-10 grade students, aged 12-17 years (14.6±2.4 years), their parents and teachers from educational institutions. Sociological, clinical, psychometric and statistical methods were used.

The study has established that the more time a student spend playing computer games, the more words in the test he/she defines as «familiar»; the difference in the means for analyzing quantitative data between groups with different degrees of involvement in computer games is significant. The results indicate that the proposed «language vocabulary» testing is suitable for additional diagnosis of the degree of computer game dependence.