A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Queen Margaret University

6.5.4.2 Written demonstration of learning
The pre-training baseline language assessments identified significant difficulties
by all participants in the written spelling of non-words. It was predicted that as
the new words were initially non-words they would also therefore contain
spelling errors. However, this was not the case for all participants, for example
C1 had difficulty spelling non-words in baseline measures but made spelling
errors on only three of the 20 new words, with those errors being closer to the
target word than baseline spelling errors (see section 5.5.2.3). Participants P3
(see section 5.6.2.3), C2 (see section 5.7.2.3) and C3 (see section 5.8.2.3) also
presented with this pattern. This reduction of errors (or elimination in C2’s case)
suggests a move from the new vocabulary being stored as non-words to real
word status for some participants. It could also be interpreted as a written form
of target-related neologisms suggesting that the new words had been learned
but spelling errors reflected participants’ difficulty accessing the new
representation from the orthographic output lexicon (Ellis and Young, 1996) and
where spelling errors did not occur it suggests that full word form representation
was present and accessible. Another explanation could be the reflection of the
fact that participants relied only on hearing the non-words for baseline measures
but had both heard and seen the visual representations of the new words during
the training session. It was not possible to differentiate the reason for the
improved spelling as in order to follow the errorless learning approach
participants were specifically not asked to attempt the spelling of the new words
before training to avoid creating maladaptive connections.
6.5.4.3 Qualitative characteristics of learning
Pre-training language assessments captured a number of different
characteristics of the spoken and written abilities of participants with aphasia.
Eight participants presented with the lexicalisation of non-words at baseline
measures during non-word repetition and reading tasks, for example, target –
[fost\®], response = [føst\®] and target – [sbˆ˜], response = [sb®ˆ˜]. Six of these
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