A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Queen Margaret University

5.10.1.1 Personal attributes
C5 was aged 56.03 at the time of the investigation and was one of the older
participants. C5 spent 13 years in formal education and had worked as a chef in
the army. The skills he required for this included, to be able to operate multiple
tasks, be creative and imaginative, have good organisational skills and to have
good communication skills (www.learndirect-advice.co.uk - profile 151). It was
predicted that C5 would learn less vocabulary than younger participants and
also less than participants with more education. C5’s self-rating for anxiety was
considered within normal limits while his score for depression was ‘borderline
abnormal’ and he was 20 months post-stroke. As the literature suggests that
emotional difficulties impact upon cognitive and linguistic performance (see
section 2.6.3.2) it was predicted that C5’s emotional status might negatively
impact upon his ability to learn the new vocabulary.
5.10.1.2 Cognitive abilities and the capacity to learn
The cognitive sub-tests of the CLQT indicated that C5 had mild deficits in
attention, executive function and visuospatial skills. As he was able to copy the
new words accurately and draw detailed pictures of the creatures the mild
impairment of visuospatial skills was not considered to affect the training or
assessment tasks. C5’s clock drawing skills were severely impaired. His
moderate memory impairment was considered to be reflective of C5’s difficulties
remembering the details of the story-retelling task and word-finding difficulties in
generation naming tasks. Attention and memory impairments would predict
some difficulty learning and recalling the new vocabulary (see section 2.6.3.3)
and while C5 demonstrated some ability to learn new information he only
achieved 72% accuracy in learning the non-linguistic task.
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