A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Queen Margaret University

- Visual lexical decision of these 16 words. This involved participants
reading words and non-words and indicating if they were real words or
non-words.
- Categorisation tasks involving (a) 15 shapes (five circles, five squares
and five triangles), (b) 15 colour pictures (Boardmaker Picture Index,
1996), five each of two closely related semantic categories (fruit and
vegetables), and five from an unrelated semantic category (clothes)
and (c) the typed labels of the 15 pictures from (b) above.
- Written spelling of six words and six non-words to dictation (PALPA,
Kay et al, 1992).
4.2.3.1 Scoring system for language abilities
All accurate responses were allocated one point. All reading, repetition,
categorisation and spelling tasks were required to be 100% accurate to receive
this score, otherwise they scored zero. The naming task had a different scoring
system. Where a participant could name the stimuli but made pronunciation
errors, they received ½ point if they produced greater than 50% of the correct
phonemes and if these phonemes were in the correct order for the target word.
When a participant did not know a particular word they were given a semantic
cue to facilitate recall. If they claimed that they knew the target word but were
unable to retrieve its pronunciation, they were given the initial phoneme or
phoneme cluster as a cue. If the participant named the target word following
cue(s) they would be given ½ point. If they could not, they would score zero for
that target word. It was intended that using this scoring system participants
would be differentiated from each other and their total performance score for the
language screening tasks would reflect the severity of their aphasia.
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