A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Queen Margaret University

2.9 CONSIDERATIONS FOR INVESTIGATING NEW VOCABULARY LEARNING
As this is a new type of investigation there are no others available for replicating
methodology, training procedures or outcome measurements. Each of the
studies discussed above (see section 2.8) involved different stimuli, various
learning techniques and procedures, had different learning criteria and
measurement of the demonstration of learning. Therefore the methodology was
created utilising the most appropriate findings from existing learning studies. The
creation of the stimuli, the use of optimal learning techniques and an appropriate
model of language processing to facilitate the assessment and evaluation of the
new learning will now be discussed.
2.9.1 Stimuli
Previous studies have used either non-words with already familiar concepts as
meanings or real word forms with abstract symbols as paired concepts (see
section 2.8.5 and sub-sections). In order to evaluate the ability to learn new
vocabulary it must be proven that each participant had no previous memory
trace of either the word form or meaning. To ensure this the new or novel
vocabulary had to be created. There is some indication that verbs and nouns are
processed differently (see section 2.8.3) and some studies have reported that
people with aphasia appear to retrieve nouns more easily than verbs (Breedin et
al. 1998), therefore in order to facilitate learning and retrieval of new vocabulary
the new words will be designed to operate as nouns. Additionally, common
nouns and proper nouns appear to operate differently (see section 2.8.3) with
proper nouns acting more like labels associated with a referent without semantic
meaning. Theories of learning suggest that new vocabulary is acquired by
forming associations with already held words or concepts making them more
meaningful (Levelt et al., 1999). Therefore the new vocabulary must also be
designed to be associated with already familiar words, and nouns are
considered to be more appropriate for this purpose. The number of words
trained in previous studies varied widely, as did the number of letters and
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