A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Queen Margaret University

extend the examination of the ability to learn new vocabulary in isolation to
analysing how these words would be incorporated into connected speech and
the factors that may impact upon their use. Additionally, new vocabulary in the
form of verbs could be examined and compared to the ability to learn and use
common nouns. This would be of particular of interest for those people with
grammatical impairments as a result of their stroke.
6.9 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
At present there is no complete theory of rehabilitation in the language domain
and it is not known if aphasia rehabilitation could incorporate new learning or if
the rehabilitation merely involved facilitating the accessing of previously known
but inaccessible memory traces. To begin to address this, people with poststroke
aphasia must be able to demonstrate that they can learn new language
related material. Prior to this investigation this was not known. While previous
studies had demonstrated that people with aphasia have the general ability to
learn, these studies involved paired stimuli with a familiar and matched novel
component. The main aim of this investigation was bridge this gap in current
knowledge and to establish if adults with post-stroke aphasia could demonstrate
new learning in the language domain.
As the investigation was original, the stimuli and procedure had to be designed
and were evaluated during rigorous preliminary and pilot studies (see Chapter 3
and Chapter 4). The outcome was a vocabulary set of 20 new words
encompassing novel word forms and novel meanings that were related to
already known words in the participants’ vocabularies. The methodology of the
investigation incorporated procedures based on evidence from the literature
where possible, in order to facilitate and promote optimum learning by
participants. Similar to the stimuli, the training procedure was developed,
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