A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Queen Margaret University

preliminary studies the British National Corpus (1998) confirmed that all 20 word
forms used in the studies were unique with each scoring zero on the word
familiarity search. Secondly, all participants from preliminary studies one, two
and four confirmed that the stimuli were not familiar to them.
3.6.1.2 Number and type of items to be learned
The preliminary studies provided evidence that there was a wide range of
learning abilities in normal participants and that a number of these participants
could learn all names and skills. It was uncertain however, whether the main
investigation participants would be able to demonstrate any learning of the new
vocabulary. Consideration of the number of items that adults with aphasia could
learn raised the possibility of reducing the amount of information to be learned to
the names alone. However there were concerns that participants would learn the
word forms as proper nouns (see section 2.8.3). Additionally, learning theory
advocates that new words are best learned by forming associations with already
held concepts or words, consolidating the meaning to already held information
(Levelt et al., 1999). Therefore it was decided to develop the new words in
relation to a ‘semantic links’ model. Each alien was now considered to be a
‘creature’ (more familiar and perhaps more ecologically valid than aliens) and
would have a name (novel word form), an image (novel meaning), a special skill
(associative meaning using ‘real’ words with unusual semantic concepts) and a
habitat and food source (‘real’ words with new associative links). Five creatures
would be semantically linked by the categories of habitat and food source. The
stimuli used for the main investigation are presented in Appendix 3.6. As
discussed (see section 3.2.2) the learning of eye colour appeared to perform
differently than the other stimuli in preliminary study one and so they were not
included in the main investigation.
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