A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Queen Margaret University

5.14.1.1 Personal attributes
C9 was aged 57;07 at the time of the investigation and was one of the oldest
participant. She had experienced 11 years in education and was previously
employed as a school dinner lady and cleaner. These jobs involve mainly light
manual work and require basic literacy and numeracy skills related to reading
and interpreting cleaning-fluid instructions (www.learndirect-advice.co.uk -
profile 257 and 1282). C’s self-rating for anxiety was rated as ‘abnormal’ and
depression as ‘borderline abnormal’ and she was 114 months post-stroke. It was
predicted that C’s personal attributes would not contribute favourably to the
learning of new vocabulary. Due to C9’s age, level of education and skills
developed in her employment, coupled with her high levels of anxiety and
depression it would be expected that she would not learn as many new words as
other participants with more favourable profiles.
5.14.1.2 Cognitive abilities and the capacity to learn
The cognitive sub-tests of the CLQT indicated that C9 had moderate attention,
executive function and visuospatial skills impairment with severe memory
processing and clock drawing abilities. Although C9’s visuospatial skills were
moderately impaired she was able to draw detailed pictures of the creatures and
copy their names accurately and legibly, therefore it was not expected to affect
the training or assessment tasks. The severity of C9’s cognitive abilities would
predict a difficulty learning and recalling new vocabulary (see section 2.6.3.3).
However, she demonstrated the capacity to learn by achieving 100% on the
non-linguistic learning task for both immediate and delayed recall.
5.14.1.3 Severity of aphasia
The language sub-test of the CLQT suggested that C9 had severe language
difficulties. C9’s language screening scores are displayed in Table 5.26 for each
task and mapped on to a cognitive neuropsychology model in Figure 5xi below.
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