A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Queen Margaret University

of 15 minutes. The option of doing so over coffee was accepted by all
participants. All materials were gathered from the students after this training
period and participants were asked not to communicate with their peers during
the assessment tasks. The images were presented one by one in the same
order as the initial presentation and participants were required to write down the
name and skill of each alien. Participants’ written responses were collected.
They were then given a multiple-choice task in which they had to choose the
aliens’ names and skills from an option of three. Their responses were then
collected.
3.5.2 Results
None of the 65 participants could guess the name or skill of any of the 20 aliens
prior to the learning phase. This confirmed that although participants for
preliminary studies one and two reported that some of the images tended to aid
their learning, the actual images did not facilitate name or skill deduction. Table
3.6 below presents a selection of the names and skills that some of the
participants suggested for the aliens. As none of the suggested names or skills
were similar to the original stimuli all 20 names and 20 skills were included in the
main investigation training procedure as new vocabulary.
Table 3.6
Preliminary Study Four
Some participant suggestions as to the names and skills of the stimuli
Alien name Suggested names Alien skill Suggested Skills
futarg bobo, james, spike, fred, freezes enemies scaring, poison tongue
pentar chickpea, flashy Invisible cloak wings of fire; flapping,
vintrok travis, pumpkin head spins nets wobbles, being evil
curvol queen cactus, bernie brush psychic flying to texas, brushing
Table 3.7 below presents the performance scores of all 65 participants and
highlights again the variability of learning abilities within the normal population.
93