A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Queen Margaret University

sentence format. Secondly, the sample was simply to further describe the
particular language difficulties that participants with aphasia presented with,
which may not be obvious with single word utterances. Participants with aphasia
would be asked to narrate the story of Cinderella in spoken and written format.
4.4.4.3 Consolidation of learning
The written and auditory stimuli used during the independent learning phase
remained with P1 between the immediate and delayed recall phase to allow her
to rehearse and consolidate her learning. This aimed to reduce the ‘recency
effect’ phenomenon where a person was most likely to recall the last items that
they have been exposed to, which in this study would be the five creatures from
session four. However it was not possible to control for the time interval between
the final practise of the stimuli by P1 and the actual delayed assessment. The
function of the delayed assessment was to assess the retention of the learned
information by each participant following a break from the training sessions.
Therefore, if a participant practised the stimuli immediately prior to the
assessment it could not categorically be called ‘delayed’ recall. Because of this
concern, it was decided not to leave the materials with participants for the main
investigation. However the problem of the ‘recency effect’ phenomenon
remained along with the fact that rehearsal and consolidation of learning was a
necessary requirement for the learning process (see section 2.8.5.3). It was
decided that following a short break at the end of session four, a brief revision of
all 20 creatures learned would be given to all participants. This would involve
participants looking at the stimuli and listening to all 20 creatures details (on prerecorded
audio tape). It was felt that consolidation and rehearsal of learning
occurred during the independent learning period of the training sessions and so
extra time with the stimuli was not considered necessary for learning to occur.
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