A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Queen Margaret University

pre-morbid presentations and functional severity. These were appraised in order
to evaluate if those factors which affected the recovery of aphasia also impacted
upon the ability to learn and/ or retain new vocabulary. This data would
contribute to information about new learning in the language domain and also
inform language rehabilitation theory by identifying factors that may impact upon
the potential to learn new words. The various factors are now presented and
discussed in relation to how they were measured; an evaluation of the method of
measuring the factors, where appropriate; the impact of these factors on the
learning of new vocabulary as tested by statistical correlations; and the
implications for new learning in the language domain. It is noted that these
observations do not reflect the effect of individual factors in isolation but rather a
pooling and interaction of all relevant factors. Additionally, while the results from
the statistical analyses in Chapter 5 represent the group of participants as a
whole, individual participant variances from the group findings were noted and
will be discussed for each factor. The factors are now presented and discussed
under various headings. Those factors considered to be personal attributes
incorporated participants’ age, education, cognitive reserve, emotional status
and stage of recovery (see section 6.3.1 and sub-headings). Biological
limitations are also discussed (see section 6.3.2). Cognitive abilities and the
capacity to learn incorporated a number of factors including, attention, memory,
executive functions, non-linguistic learning and clock drawing skills (see section
6.3.3 and sub-headings). The language ability of participants (see section 6.3.4
and sub-headings) and learning strategies used by participants (see section
6.3.5) were considered important factors to evaluate and are also discussed
below.
6.3.1 Personal attributes
The factors considered under the heading of personal attributes incorporated the
age of participants, the number of years spent in formal education, emotional
status of anxiety and depression and the number of months post-stroke.
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