A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Queen Margaret University

4.3.1 Baseline measures
Prior to each training session, participants performed a listening and reading
baseline recognition task. This comprised of five familiar creatures, five novel
word forms to be trained and five control non-words (see Appendix 4.6). As the
creatures to be trained were novel it was expected that the scores for each task
would be zero recognition for these new items. These baseline tasks allowed
participants to display their knowledge of already familiar creatures and their
ability to recognise non-words. It also provided practise of some assessments
that they would undertake following the training period, thereby reducing test
artefact effects. Replication of the baseline tasks following training would allow
direct observation of vocabulary learned.
4.3.2 Training procedure
Participants were initially introduced to and familiarised with the stimuli during
the training procedure through a pre-exposure judgement task. Participants
were required to look at each creature’s image and state if they recognised
them. They were then shown the images again and asked for their opinion/
judgement of the creatures. At this stage participants had not been given any
additional information about each creature. If a participant was unable to selfgenerate
an opinion the researcher asked two questions from the following;
does the creature look intelligent, honest, happy, angry, scary, friendly? This
part of the learning process incorporated the pre-exposure judgement task that
would make the semantic basis for further staggered learning (Downes et al,
1997; Kalla et al, 2001) (see section 2.9.2). The training then began using a
staggered learning approach where the phonological information (i.e. word form)
was introduced (see section 4.3.2.1) and followed by training of the semantic
information (word meaning and associated word links) (see section 4.3.2.2).
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