A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Queen Margaret University

5.8.1.1 Personal attributes
C3 was aged 54.03 at the time of the investigation and was one of the older
participants. It would therefore be predicted that C3 would learn less vocabulary
than younger participants but more than older participants. C3 had spent 13
years in education and pre-morbidly was a homemaker. Although homemaking
and motherhood requires many organisational and planning skills
(http://www.stepfour.com/jobs/301474010.htm) it would be predicted that
participants with more education and more highly specialised employment might
learn more vocabulary than C3. C3 self-rating for anxiety was quite high with
depression rating considered to be within normal limits. She was 96 months
post-stroke. Being one of the older participants and having less education and
involvement in skilled employment would predict that C3 may not learn as many
new words as other more highly skilled and younger participants.
5.8.1.2 Cognitive abilities and the capacity to learn
The cognitive sub-tests of the CLQT indicated that C3’s cognitive abilities were
within normal limits with the exception of memory, which was moderately
impaired. It was felt that this was reflective of C3’s word-finding difficulties in the
story-retelling task and word generation tasks. Memory impairment would
predict some difficulty learning and recalling the new vocabulary (see section
2.6.3.3) however, she demonstrated the capacity to recall newly learned
information by recalling 100% of the non-linguistic task for both immediate and
delayed recall.
5.8.1.3 Severity of aphasia
The language sub-test of the CLQT suggested that C3 had mild language
difficulties. Her language screening scores are displayed in Table 5.14 for each
task and mapped on to a cognitive neuropsychology model in Figure 5v below.
C3’s data (see Table 5.14 and Figure 5v below) indicated that her main difficulty
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