A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Queen Margaret University

vocabulary than younger participants. However, P3 had experienced 20 years of
formal education and had completed undergraduate and post-graduate degrees
(see section 4.6.1), and therefore would be expected to have highly developed
skills in learning (see section 2.6.1.2). P3’s employment as a pharmacist
involved specialist training and having excellent organisation skills, being able to
work methodically, have logical thought processes and highly developed
communication skills (www.learndirect-advice.co.uk - profile 163). P3’s selfrating
for anxiety and depression placed him within normal limits and he was
seven months post-stroke. Despite P3’s age it would be predicted that his
experience in education and employment would have a positive impact on his
ability to learn new vocabulary. Additionally, there were no adverse emotional
factors to impact upon his learning ability.
5.6.1.2 Cognitive abilities and the capacity to learn
The CLQT indicated that P3 had mild cognitive difficulties in attention, memory,
executive function and visuospatial skill domains. Clock drawing skills were
within normal limits. P3 demonstrated adequate attention, memory and
executive function skills to achieve 100% accuracy in learning the non-linguistic
task for both immediate and delayed recall. His ability to copy words and draw
the creature images in detail demonstrated that any visuospatial difficulties did
not affect the tasks involved in the investigation. As P3’s cognitive difficulties
were mild in nature and he had demonstrated the capacity to learn new
information it was predicted that cognitive factors would not severely impact
upon his learning of the new vocabulary.
5.6.1.3 Severity of aphasia
The language sub-test of the CLQT indicated that P3 had mild language
difficulties. Language screening scores for P3 are displayed in Table 5.10 for
each task and mapped on to a cognitive neuropsychology model in Figure 5iii
below.
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