A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Queen Margaret University

session. This reflected the general consensus of information being learned in
chunks therefore facilitating easier access when recalling this information under
the same conditions as originally learned.
4.4.4.2 Addition / amendment of materials
While P1 was able demonstrate her learning in spoken format, participants with
aphasia may not have adequate speech to do so. Therefore, to further facilitate
demonstration of learning of the novel words (during the cold recall task) by
participants with aphasia, it was decided that participants would also be required
to recall the new words in written form and (if required) their skill, habitat and
food source. This would also facilitate comparison of participants’ written output
of the new vocabulary with their spoken performance, as well as with their
written performance on already familiar words. Instead of using the same five
familiar creatures as stimuli for each session’s lexical recognition task (spoken
and written), a different set of familiar creatures would be used for each session.
The reason for this amendment was two-fold; firstly, it would use the same
combined amount of stimuli in each session and would be the same number of
items in the delayed recall assessment stimuli (i.e. 20 familiar words, 20 newly
learned words and 20 non-words) (see Appendix 4.6). Secondly, it would offer
participants more opportunity to succeed (assuming they recognised the familiar
words).
It was also felt that there was a gap in the screening assessment where there
was no sample of connected speech. This would be important for describing the
language of participants with aphasia. The narration of the Cinderella story in
both spoken and written form is a widely used method of obtaining a sample of
connected speech (Rochon, Saffran, Berndt and Schwartz, 2000; Saffran,
Berndt and Schwartz, 1989). While there are methods of analysing these
speech samples in depth, this study did not employ them for two reasons.
Firstly, the main investigation trained and assessed single words rather than
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