A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Queen Margaret University

acquiring new skills, information and vocabulary implies laying down new
synaptic connections i.e. plasticity in a damaged system or the brain utilising an
unused part of the brain. The ability of the adult brain to learn or acquire new
skills and information has been discussed (see section 2.5.2). The next section
will discuss specifically some of the characteristics of vocabulary that will inform
the stimuli for the main investigation (i.e. word forms, word meaning and
grammatical behaviour). Current evidence for learning vocabulary by healthy
adults and adults with post-stroke aphasia will be discussed.
2.8 LEARNING VOCABULARY
There is much evidence that we begin to learn even before we are born. The
neonatal infant recognises its mother’s voice over other voices as soon as it is
born because it has been hearing its mother’s voice for several months before
birth (Fifer and Moon, 1994). After birth the brain continues to develop and what
a child learns and experiences is reflected in the neuronal patterns and
connections of their brain (Robertson, 1999). Here too the acquisition of
language begins. From the day a child is born it begins to learn to communicate
using speech, gesture and later writing (Nation, 1995). For the purpose of this
investigation the focus will be on what is termed as the basic element of
language – vocabulary, i.e. the range of words known to a person (Fowler and
Fowler, 1990), which consists of connections between each word’s form and
meaning (Black and Chiat, 2003). There is not yet a complete theory of how
vocabulary is learned by children and many studies have investigated the size
and growth of a child’s vocabulary rather than the acquisition process itself
(Schmidt, 1998). As adults this acquisition of knowledge continues, resulting in
cortical reorganisation that occurs due to new neuronal patterns being created
(see section 2.5.2). A representation of each word that is learned is thought to
be stored in a type of mental dictionary called a lexicon, which contains all
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