A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Queen Margaret University

assessment (see section 4.2.3). As the literature indicates various factors that
are thought to impact upon recovery from aphasia (see section 2.6) it was
considered useful to examine some of these factors in relation to the findings for
this population sample as a whole using hierarchical cluster analyses and other
statistical analyses (see section 5.18). Participant P3 from the pilot studies (see
section 4.6) was not included in these group analyses as he did not complete all
tasks for the immediate recall assessments. The tasks and stimuli were also
considered in terms of their contribution to the scores and inter-reliability of the
four learning sessions is noted (see section 5.18.3 and sub-sections). The final
section of this chapter summarises these analyses.
5.2 METHOD
5.2.1 Participant criteria and selection
The inclusion criteria for participation in this investigation were chosen in order
to eliminate as many contaminating factors as possible and are listed and
discussed below.
- In order to eliminate possible age-related artefacts participants were aged
65 years or younger. This is in line with the division in the National Health
Service (NHS Scotland, 2002), which determines that older adults are
those aged 65 or older. Young adults are therefore those aged 64 or
younger.
- The potential of rehabilitation for the participant population was
considered to be an important factor therefore any language disability
presented by participants was as a result of a stroke. This also ensured
that any aphasia would not be transient or progressive (see section 2.2).
The severity and type of aphasia was not specified in order to obtain and
analyse performance from people with a wide variety of language
difficulties.
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