A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Queen Margaret University

anked as low scorers in the immediate and delayed recall tasks were ranked 4 th
and 5 th respectively in the amount of new learning they retained, indicating that
although C9 and C7 had only learned 24% (raw score 76 from a possible
maximum of 320) and 48% (raw score of 155 from a possible maximum of 320)
(respectively), they retained 74% and 71% of this new learning (respectively),
suggesting a deep level of learning or a good ability to recall it from long-term
memory. Conversely, P3 and C2 were ranked high scorers in their ability to
learn and recall the information about the new words however they only retained
49% and 66% respectively of this newly learned vocabulary. This indicates that
perhaps they were able to learn the information initially but it was not all stored
in long-term memory or they were unable to retrieve the information they had
learned. Therefore, the amount of information learned in the immediate recall did
not relate to the percentage of that information retained.
5.3.1 Comparison of characteristics of learning between aphasic and
normal populations
The pattern of wide variation in the performance of people with aphasia mirrored
that of the normal population performance in the preliminary and pilot studies
(see section 3.5 and 4.4). There were also some qualitative similarities between
the normal population and the aphasic population. Occasionally, they made
semantic errors between the new words and the images; phonemic errors;
described skills when unable to think of the target word (e.g. ‘something to do
with vision’, for the skill of x-ray vision), and experienced between-session
interference when the name (new word) or skill for one creature was attributed
to another. However, qualitative differences were also revealed in the data for
the population with aphasia when compared with the data from the normal
population. Those aspects of performance unique to the participants with
aphasia are presented with some examples in Table 5.5 below. It was felt
therefore that the variation in performance of people with aphasia could be
attributed to more than merely normal variation.
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