A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Queen Margaret University

severe spoken and / or written impairments. For instance, due to severe
expressive aphasia C2 was only able to name four of the new words in spoken
form (see section 5.7.2.1). If this were the only measure of new learning it would
have suggested that he was unable to learn much of the vocabulary. However,
C2 demonstrated this learning by naming all 20 of the new words in written
format. C7 was unable to communicate in spoken or written format (see section
5.12.2) and was only able to demonstrate the spoken retrieval of three new
words and none for written recall, suggesting that she had only learned three
words. However C7 could match 11 new words (listening and reading) to their
correct images and skills indicating that these new words were learned despite
her being unable to say or write them. Convergent evidence of new learning was
provided from a variety of assessment tasks in particular for cases where it was
suspected that successful responses to target tasks could be through chance
alone, in particular for low scoring participants. One such participant was C10
who recalled only 16% of information (raw score of 50 from a maximum total of
320) however she demonstrated that this information was learned rather than as
a result of chance through accurately matching the new words with picture for
five words (listening and reading), for three of these words she identified their
skills and two of them she also identified their habitat and food.
6.5.4 Facilitate predictions for new learning by participants
As discussed, the single word processing abilities and difficulties of participants
were identified using the pre-training language screening assessment tasks.
Inferences were made regarding each participant’s particular presentation of
aphasia in terms of alleged intact and impaired modules and pathways of the
cognitive neuropsychological model. These were then mapped onto individual
cognitive neuropsychology models to give a visual representation of their
language processing abilities. This information was used to make predictions
about anticipated difficulties that participants would encounter in learning the
new word forms and / or word meanings as a result of their language impairment
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