A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Queen Margaret University

Chapter 3
Preliminary Studies
3.1 INTRODUCTION
As discussed in Chapter 2, there have been a small number of investigations,
which evaluated the learning of vocabulary by healthy adults with no history of
brain damage, adults with memory impairment and adults with aphasia (see
section 2.8.5 and subsections). These investigations mainly focused on the
comparison of the effectiveness of various learning techniques in new learning.
The investigations employed various stimuli to observe and assess vocabulary
learning – foreign words, native language words considered to be unfamiliar to
participants and non-words. However, these investigations essentially evaluated
the ability of participants to pair or associate new information with already held
representations rather than assessing the ability of participants to acquire new
vocabulary representations (i.e. new word form and new meaning). As
discussed (see section 2.7), there is currently no theoretical account or model of
aphasia rehabilitation which makes the process(es) involved in the rehabilitation
of aphasia explicit, and therefore it is not known if aphasia rehabilitation merely
accesses already stored but currently inaccessible memory traces of language,
or if new cortical connections are being made through new learning. A first step
in addressing this area of knowledge is to establish if adults with aphasia can in
fact demonstrate learning of new vocabulary despite residual language
difficulties, which is what this investigation aimed to do. As this is a pioneering
investigation there is currently no normative data from the adult population on
the acquisition of this type of new vocabulary (number of items learned,
strategies used etc.) or the appropriate type of stimuli to employ. Therefore
preliminary studies were carried out with two main objectives. Firstly, the
‘learnability’ of the newly created stimuli (i.e. new word forms with novel
meanings) were evaluated by adults with normal language and cognitive
processes also providing normative data. Secondly, a number of methodological
matters in preparation for the main investigation were addressed.
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