A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Queen Margaret University

originally intended syllables i.e. [heɪmkən]. Nine participants pronounced the
initial vowel [ʌ] from the word ‘JUNFLIZ’ i.e. [dƷʌnflɪʦ] as was intended, so this
remained unchanged. The final consonant of ‘JUNFLIZ’ also caused difficulties
in the first two studies with many participants pronouncing it [dƷʌnflɪz]. Nine
participants in this study also pronounced the ending as [z] and therefore this
pronunciation was changed for the main investigation. It was noted that another
new word was read aloud differently than originally created (TRAIGOL) i.e.
[tɹaɪgɔl], All ten participants pronounced it as [tɹeɪgɔl] instead of the intended
pronunciation.
3.4.3 Discussion and implications
The transcriptions from the ten participants demonstrated that the majority of the
written words matched their expected spoken pronunciations with the exception
of the words HAMEKIN and JUNFLIZ. These were amended for the main
investigation. Unexpectedly, one other creature was pronounced differently than
anticipated (i.e. TRAIGOL), however as there had been no difficulties with its
pronunciation by any participants in the previous two preliminary studies it was
not deemed necessary to change this item for the main investigation - either
pronunciation would be acceptable by future participants.
As discussed (see section 3.3.3) it was decided not to train a matched
participant control group with the stimuli as part of the main investigation due to
the evident variability in learning by the normal population. It was however
considered useful to evaluate the amount of time required by this population to
learn the additional stimuli and also to obtain additional normative data on new
learning as the sample population was small. A further preliminary study was
planned to further this end.
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