A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Queen Margaret University

5.11.1.1 Personal attributes
C6 was aged 56.10 at the time of the investigation and was one of the older
participants. Although C6 had spent only 13 years in formal education he had
developed specialist skills and was a self-employed engineer. These skills
required him to be able to analyse and critically evaluate complex problems,
have excellent communication skills and be able to categorise and plan
effectively (www.learndirect-advice.co.uk - profile 357). It was predicted that C6
would learn less vocabulary than younger participants although his highly
developed employment skills may facilitate this learning. C6’s self-rating for
anxiety was considered ‘abnormal’ while his score for depression was
‘borderline abnormal’ and he was 13 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 C6’s emotional status
might negatively impact upon his ability to learn the new vocabulary.
5.11.1.2 Cognitive abilities and the capacity to learn
The cognitive sub-tests of the CLQT indicated that C6’s attention, executive
function and visuospatial skills were within normal limits but his memory was
moderately impaired and clock drawing skills severely impaired. It was felt that
this was reflective of C6’s difficulties remembering the details of the storyretelling
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, C6 demonstrated some capacity to
learn and recall new information by recalling 78% of the non-linguistic task for
both immediate and delayed recall.
5.11.1.3 Severity of aphasia
The language sub-test of the CLQT suggested that C6 had moderate language
difficulties. His language screening scores are presented in Table 5.20 for each
task and mapped on to a cognitive neuropsychology model in Figure 5viii below.
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