A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Queen Margaret University

The novel stimuli were evaluated and considered to be suitable to use as new
vocabulary both in word form and word meaning and were considered
‘learnable’ by the healthy adult population (preliminary studies one, two and
four). The results of preliminary study three resolved the conflict between the
written novel words and their spoken pronunciation, which arose for two of the
word forms ‘hamekin’ and ‘junfliz’ and their pronunciation for the main
investigation were amended accordingly. Participants in preliminary study one
replicated their learning performance in preliminary study two. No practise effect
was observed between preliminary studies one and two (although interference
was observed between the studies) – some participants improved their learning
performance, others remained the same and other participants performed
slightly worse. There was no overall significant difference between the two
studies.
Being unique, participants would have no memory trace of the stimuli and
therefore there was no requirement for ‘untrained’ stimuli for control purposes.
Preliminary studies one, two and four strongly demonstrated a wide variation in
the number of stimuli learned by the adult ‘normal’ population indicating that a
matched control population would not be appropriate for the main investigation.
The variability of learning preference (tape recording versus face-to-face) and
assessment preference (with and without visual cues) informed the main
investigation to include a variety of procedures to assist in the facilitation of
learning and retrieving the new vocabulary by participants in the main
investigation. In addition, as participants reported that they felt more
comfortable memorising the new vocabulary alone, a period of ‘independent
learning time’ during the main investigation would be combined with face-to-face
interaction with participants.
Further, it was envisaged that various influencing factors resulting from
participants’ stroke could affect their ability to learn the new vocabulary and
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