A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Queen Margaret University

participants also lexicalised the newly learned words on occasion, for example,
target – [sneˆtl], response = [sneˆl], target – [sˆlva®k], response = [sˆlv\®]. Overall
participants were aware of these errors but unable to inhibit the familiar word
responses or unable to offer alternatives. Although C1 and C6 made lexical
errors on baseline measures they did not present with this characteristic for the
newly learned words, suggesting perhaps that these words had well established
lexical representations with strong activation patterns that did not compete with
other similar lexical representations. Ellis and Young (1996) report rapid
interaction between the phonological output lexicon and phonemic output buffer
and when one or more of these pathways are impaired such errors occur.
Although the corpus is small, these instances of non-word lexicalisation in the
main investigation are consistent with the literature regarding phonological
neighbourhood effects where phonologically related lexical items (usually
considered to differ from the target word by one phoneme) are assumed to
compete for lexical selection resulting in an incorrect choice of word (Gordon,
2002; Luce and Pisoni, 1998) and words with similar sounds are activated
simultaneously interfering with lexical selection (Ellis and Young, 1996). Where
participants presented with perseveration of phonemes or syllables in their
responses to already familiar words (four participants) this was also a feature of
their responses for the newly learned words.
6.5.5 Some support and criticisms of the cognitive neuropsychological
model
The cognitive neuropsychological model proved useful for the current
investigation, indicating that it is a robust method for identifying characteristics of
new vocabulary learning at single word level, particularly for those individuals
where spoken or written demonstration of this learning is hampered by
phonological or orthographic impairment. One criticism of the cognitive
neuropsychological model is that it is an off-line method of representing data,
providing a snapshot of the single word processing abilities at one moment in
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