A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Queen Margaret University

This chapter presents four preliminary studies that contributed to the
development of the methodology for the main investigation. While previous
investigations have examined the learning strategies of associating new stimuli
with already known representations with healthy adults (see section 2.8.5.1) the
strategies and their effectiveness used by this population in the acquisition of
new vocabulary had not been examined. Preliminary study one addressed this
matter by investigating what strategies or techniques were employed by healthy
adults to learn this new vocabulary. Preliminary study two investigated if a
particular learning strategy found to be used by high scoring participants in
preliminary study one was related to the number of items that they could learn.
As the stimuli had been created and paired by the researcher alone it was
considered prudent to investigate any possible influences of this one-person
design, therefore this study also investigated if there were intrinsic links between
the various characteristics and attributes of the stimuli (rather than a particular
learning strategy) that made them easier to learn. Additionally, it was determined
whether some characteristics of the stimuli were easier to learn than others, for
example, word form versus word meaning. This preliminary study also assessed
the replication of participant performance from study one to evaluate reliability of
performance. Preliminary study three investigated and reconciled conflict that
arose from the previous two studies between the written novel word forms and
their spoken pronunciations. Finally, preliminary study four ascertained if the
various characteristics assigned to the images could be deduced from merely
looking at the images and contributed to the development of a suitable method
of presenting the stimuli for participants with aphasia in the main investigation. It
also provided additional normative data on the learning of the stimuli by the
normal population using a larger corpus of stimuli and participants. The stimuli
were considered to be novel, however to eliminate any prior knowledge bias of
the researcher and the possibility of triggering a familiar memory trace in
participants it was considered prudent to confirm the uniqueness of the stimuli
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