A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Queen Margaret University

5.9.1.1 Personal attributes
C4 was aged 42;11 at the time of the investigation and was one of the younger
participants. Although C4 had spent only 14 years in formal education he had
developed specialist skills and was manager of a manufacturing plant. His
employment required him to be a strong communicator and developed skills
such as, decision making and problem solving abilities and organisational and
management skills (www.learndirect-advice.co.uk - profile 1061). It was
predicted that C4 would learn more vocabulary than older and less educated/
skilled participants. C4’s HADs self-rating for anxiety and depression were within
normal limits and he was 13 months post-stroke.
5.9.1.2 Cognitive abilities and the capacity to learn
The cognitive sub-tests of the CLQT indicated that C4 had moderate attention
and memory difficulties, mild clock drawing skills and executive functioning, and
visuospatial skills were within normal limits. It was felt that this was reflective of
C4’s word-finding difficulties in the story-retelling task and word-finding
difficulties in generation naming tasks. Memory impairment would predict some
difficulty learning and recalling the new vocabulary (see section 2.6.3.3)
however, C4 demonstrated the capacity to learn and recall new information by
recalling 100% of the non-linguistic task for both immediate and delayed recall.
5.9.1.3 Severity of aphasia
The language sub-test of the CLQT suggested that C4 had moderate language
difficulties. His language screening scores are presented in Table 5.16 for each
task and mapped on to a cognitive neuropsychology model in Figure 5vi below.
C4’s data (see Table 5.16 and Figure 5vi below) indicated that he had wordfinding
difficulties, which is revealed in qualitative data where C4 made semantic
errors when naming (although he self-corrected accurately). He also had
difficulties in reading aloud and spelling non-words and also made some spelling
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