A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Queen Margaret University

for months post-stroke, severity of aphasia and memory. The more frequent
grouping of C5 and C6 suggests that they shared more characteristics than C4.
Cluster 4 appeared to be a strong cluster where participants grouped for all
factors with the exception of age, memory, visuospatial skills and clock drawing
skills. The final cluster (five) appeared to be the least coherent of the groups as
the participants tended to group together as two rather than three group
members at a time with participant C9 being the common participant for all but
one of the group’s variables.
While the power of the cluster analyses above is not strong it enables qualitative
observations and comparisons about the learning behaviour of the participants
and their similarities and difference in characteristics and abilities. The factors
that tended to fall into groups that reflected the groupings for learning
performance were months post-stroke, severity of aphasia, attention,
visuospatial skills and the ability to learn the non-linguistic route task. There
were a number of factors that did not group people in their original clusters, in
particular, executive functions and clock drawing skills. However, no one factor
appeared to relate directly to learning ability alone. Quantitative statistical
correlations were then used to test hypotheses, derived from the literature and
participant learning performance, relating to the factors that were considered to
affect the ability of people with aphasia to learn the new vocabulary. P3 was
included in the data used to test the first hypothesis (see section 5.5), however,
as he did not take part in two tasks for the immediate recall assessment (see
section 4.6.3), his performance was not included in the group statistics.
5.18.2 Statistical correlations between learning performance and
various participant factors
Significance of correlations between the variables highlighted above (see
section 5.18.1) is now explored. The variables to be considered are divided into
the following categories; personal attributes (see section 5.4.2.1), cognitive
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