A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Queen Margaret University

the investigation of people with post-stroke aphasia. Additionally, perhaps the
therapeutic process should be patient driven rather than therapist driven and a
more flexible approach to individual participation in language therapy be
established.
6.7 EVALUATION OF THE INVESTIGATION
This investigation was original and therefore the stimuli and methodology had to
be developed. The novel stimuli were created by the researcher and
incorporated novel word forms with novel meanings as well as associations to
already familiar words. The British National Corpus (1998) and 75 adults from
the normal population established that these new words were original and
unique. These stimuli were not only unique for the main investigation but is also
the first new vocabulary that has been reportedly used to evaluate the capacity
of adults with aphasia to learn new vocabulary. This had been a methodological
issue with previous learning investigations with this population (see sections
2.8.6 and 2.9.1). The training methodology was based on optimum methods of
learning from published research, in particular pre-exposure of stimuli providing
a staggered learning experience, imagery techniques in the form of selfjudgement
tasks and tasks based on the concept of errorless learning (see
section 2.9.2). Previous studies used different methods of evaluating learning
with some of them employing spoken and/or written responses alone. However
this investigation employed a range of assessments to facilitate the
demonstration of learning particularly by those participants unable to respond in
spoken and /or written formats. The results suggested that the assessment
tasks used to evaluate new vocabulary learning were sensitive enough not to
disadvantage non-verbal participants (see Table 5.2 and sections 5.3, 5.17).
The preliminary and pilot studies provided a robust evaluation of the stimuli and
methodology and provided opportunity for enhancing the training and
282