A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Queen Margaret University

presentation. It was proposed that particular difficulties that participants would
have with the new words would mirror their impaired performance with already
familiar words. These predictions relating to the spoken and written responses
of participants will now be discussed as well as some qualitative characteristics
of their learning performance.
6.5.4.1 Spoken demonstration of learning
The pre-training language assessments identified both semantic and phonemic
errors by participants on already familiar words as well as phonemic errors on
non-words. It was predicted that error patterns of newly learned vocabulary
would mirror those errors presented at baseline measures. Eleven participants
presented with phonemic errors on non-words in the baseline tasks and the new
words were also spoken with phonemic errors. However some participants
made less phonemic errors on the new words. The presence of such targetrelated
neologisms in the newly learned words is consistent with the literature
which proposes that the representations of the new words would exist in a
person’s lexicon, however they would have difficulty accessing this
representation. This suggests the creation of new representations despite the
presence of phonemic errors due to difficulty accessing the full representation of
the word form, similar to an exaggerated tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon
encountered by adults without language impairment (Ellis and Young, 1996). Six
participants presented with semantic errors on baseline language tasks and also
presented with semantic errors relating to the newly learned information
however errors were mainly on already familiar words (i.e. skills, habitat and
food) rather than on the new words themselves. Word-finding difficulties were
characteristics of nine participants on baseline language tasks and were also
present in their performance on recalling the new words and associated skills as
indicated by slow response time and the requirement for syllable cues to
facilitate access for participants (for example C4 and C5).
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