a. memory retrieval. I block on words and names. For days I couldn’t recall Mel Gibson’s name. (No problem just now — go figure.) Frequent tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, and it may repeat for days. So after someone suggested “Mel Gibson” a few days ago, next day I blocked him again. I’ve had such blocks prior to the stroke, but only with very few words.

b. short-term memory. Distract me for a second, I can’t remember the previous train of thought.

c. pronouns. I still have to think carefully about how to negotiate multiple pronouns in a sentence in sundry grammatical roles.

d. [I just got distracted, and now I can't remember what I was going to write here.]

d. typing. I frequently type a word other than the one I intend. Usually it’s a related word (usually same grammar category) or it’s a word that I just rejected. This seems to have been the very first symptom I observed of the stroke two year ago: typing a reply, the screen showed something other than what I meant to type. Happened again immediately. That’s when I guessed I was having a stroke.

e. fast speech. It seems to me I have trouble following fast speech in some contexts. At jury duty a couple of days ago, I wasn’t always sure I caught the instructions from the handler. Sometimes I have to listen twice to John Stewart’s quips.

f. [Again, distracted.]

f. agitated speech. In a heated argument, I can scarcely speak at all.

g. grammatical roles. Beyond pronouns, I also have to think through grammatical roles generally. I don’t always get them right.

h. word choice. Often can’t find the word I’d like.

It would be useful to practice speech, but social contexts are too emotionally complex for methodical practice.

Prepared speech is much easier. If I’ve thought through the topic, I’m that much more likely to express myself smoothly.

The compromise to memory is least clear. After all, I’m getting older anyway.

So I’m left with the same question as two years ago: is there a specific linguistic deficit, or is it all just a memory impairment, just a function of operating on a smaller switchboard? Only the typing phenomenon seems unrelated.

Cognitively, I seem to be fine. On my other blog, for example, I showed that widely-believed claims about ternary logic of the Aymara language are false, producing both evidence and argument, and comparing bivalent and trivalent treatments of multiple premises. It’s not the Gödel theorem, but it does better than the views of those who believe the claims about Aymara, including those of the originator, who was an AI engineer. So memory and language deficits don’t have to affect cognitive ability at all. I’m still writing and reading on economics, and I can see where other’s theories fail (I published a piece a few months ago on rent regulations which is the only analysis I know of that gets the NYC macro and micro market right, and it shows convincingly that most economists have misunderstood it, getting the empirical predictions wrong.)

Here’s the Aymara piece:

http://languageandphilosophy.wordpress.com/2012/01/06/aymara-trivalence-competing-satisfaction-and-modality/

To complicate matters, there may be different kinds of attention to thought. Thoughts may take a variety of transports — there may be, as it were, thought-trains that can be derailed, thought buses on highways which can reroute, thought skateboards and unpathed thought fields in which no matter your transport you don’t get derailed or get lost at all.

Anyway, I can’t help but wonder whether memory plays a part in long-distance grammatical relationships.

I can be tongue-tied under stress in agitated conversation, yet in public speaking, I have noticed no trouble. I gave the best ex tempore speech I ever gave, I think, at a packed house of a movie theater to introduce the re-release of Rogosin’s 1957 On the Bowery. You’d think there’d be a lot of stress in that. But there’s a paradox of public speaking — the words somehow come; the stress seems to help, not hinder. I did a radio snippet live on Leonard Lopate’s show –  stressful (it’s a prestigious program), yet I was fluent. Here’s the live interview — you can hear my speechflow and judge for yourself. Listen carefully and you will hear a perfect example of topic/agent/patient jumble: “The recession lost the financing.” The meaning intent was, ‘The recession lost them their financing,’ or ‘The recession caused a loss of financing’ or ‘Developers lost financing in the recession.’ It’s the topic — the recession — that I’ve failed to negotiate into the grammar of a complex relation among entities: finance, recession, developers, buildings.

On the other hand, I am reluctant to return to public story telling. Even when I give tours about familiar terrain — I give historical walking tours of Chinatown, the Bowery, Alphabet City — I can block on almost any word. I haven’t completely managed to negotiate such losses. I’m at the point at which I no longer am willing to settle for a substitute word. Having come this far in recovery, I want the ‘right’ word already, damn it.

And one more bizarre effect: when I type, I often type a word different, though related, from the one I intend, as if the other half of the brain were typing a slightly different story, or a second command to the hands somehow didn’t get there in time, leaving the previous command to be implemented.

Maybe there just isn’t room enough up there anymore to handle it all.

Today, I described a local unsavory character (let’s call him Al) with the expression, “I wouldn’t put it past him.” But I had trouble figuring out not only the pronoun sequence but also the ‘past’ relation. Was it that I didn’t think he’d passed it or it passed him? Or was it that I thought he would not pass him or him pass it?

After stumbling and trying a couple of jumbled efforts, my interlocutor offered, “you don’t put it past him to steal Mike’s idea,” to which I responded with, “what does it mean? Who is past what?” She replied, “It’s okay, we know what you mean.”

It’s such a dense phrase, interweaving a [can't recall the term...this is taking a while...] formulaic or schematic expression, but an unusually complex one, requiring three pronouns, a believer, an object of a verb and an object of a preposition, a metaphorical distance relation with a twist of negation.

The distance relation alone is confounding. I once tried to explain to a non-English speaker the difference between ‘before’ and ‘after’ and ‘behind’. It was a comedy of confusion. Suppose you’re standing in the yard of a house, facing the house and talking about the back yard of the house. The house is before you and in front of you and the back yard, relative to the house, is before it. The back yard is also behind the house, relative to you. Yet the back yard is also further in front of the house, relative to the acreage extending beyond, although the house is in front of the back yard, relative to you. It’s hopeless.

Then there’s all those pronouns. My meaning was that Al is beyond stealing — he won’t stop at stealing — and so I wouldn’t put it past him. That is, I would put him past it. This was not so clear to me at the time. The mere syntactic act of getting the sequence right was a challenge, since the usual simple cues (subject-object, agent-patient) were all thrown off by this metaphorical place relation and the additional hurdle of negation.

And even now, I have to figure it out, like counting on fingers. I wouldn’t put him past it? Or I wouldn’t put it past him? The latter, I think.

Do normal speakers think this one through, or is the neuter pronoun automatic in the second place as verbal object? Did I get confused simply because I tripped over the syntactic sequence? Or is it a genuine loss of semantic relations?

My interlocutor today didn’t explicitly map out the relation, but just gave the correct expression and said “We know what you mean.”

At a remove of six months, I have regained full normal functionality. On this I have objective measures: already two months ago I gave three long TV interviews on local issues about neighborhood preservation, and a long radio piece on the history of Alphabet City for FUV — all ex tempore, fluent and articulate, and were broadcast as such. (Although on FUV I said “the people belong to the space they live in” when I meant, “the space belongs to the people who live in them.” The confusion probably arose because both situations were true.)

I do notice a difference. It’s most evident when I’m agitated. All complications of syntax and lexical retrieval can trip me up when I’m excited. And occasionally, even calm, I find odd difficulties. I have persistent trouble with the noun phrase, “festival judges.” Observe that the denotation is a person: the judges. But the description depends on festivals, which are not persons. Accessing the description requires attention to a concept orthogonal to the denotation. That’s my explanation. But why is it so persistent?

I have one more set of data to upload, but I have been a bit lazy about retyping them. I expect it will be the last. I have ceased to keep a careful record: the types are all predictable now.

I still see an echo of this difficulty in a coupe of places. Here’s a bit of data I haven’t mentioned yet: difficulty with a punchline of a joke.

I have a small repertory of jokes — only three, actually, aside from a few childhood ‘knock, knock’s. One I can easily tell until I get to the punchline, at which moment I can’t easily produce it, even after a long pause. The line: “I’m afraid I’ve been eating my entrees with my salad fork.” It seems simple, but I’m never ready to set it out in order, rather than, “I’m afraid I have been using my salad fork to eat my entrees.” I’m not sure the order matters all that much, but I’m trying for the former version and can’t quite figure how to strategize the sentence to get it that way.

There are a number of issues that bear on this difficulty. It’s very much akin to the pronoun confusions that still plague me. It also seems related to the limits on my ability to keep a thread from distraction. And again it’s like the scrambling of formulas. Even the loss of tense, which is a kind of memory and strategizing over the long distance, and the confusions of thematic roles (interesting/interested), which is another kind of ability that depends on a store of relations over distance.

I wish I could pinpoint the origin of all these: limited storage? loss of grammar? weakened procedural memory? just a loose collection of damaged functions?

One more related fact: I have trouble with long institutional names. My own group, Lower East Sides Residents for Responsible Development, get tough after “residents,” although I know the last word, “development.” I used to rattle this off without thinking, but now I not only have to think it through, I have trouble thinking it through. I’ve had the same problem with Greenwich Village Society for Historical Preservation, even with its initialism, GVSHP, though to be honest, I always found it a bit of an alphabet soup.

This suggests a Wernicke’s problem, or a declarative memory issue. But it’s interesting that procedural reconstruction of these is not easy. Maybe I’ve lost a bit of both types.

Have I lost a piece of memory function or am I just working with less space to keep time? If I work hard retracing a previous thread, I’ll usually get back, just because it’s within the area of the context of the conversation. But word retrieval can be impossible, and made worse by the strange effect that I seem to reject with incredulity the sought-for word when I finally retrieve it.

More data soon.

Btw, I recently tried a working-memory test on line and performed at average, though much faster than average, surprisingly, since I’m a slow reader/responder, and never could read well under stress. It was designed for the general public, but I don’t know the details of the pool of subjects. Maybe aphasics like me are drawn to such tests when offered on adverts — which is how I saw it. I’d imagine that aphasics would slow down the average speeds and the working-memory load.

Breaking news: I found several articles correlating helicobacter pylori and stroke:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15694938?dopt=Abstract
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15064099?dopt=Abstract
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15694938?dopt=Abstract
as well as
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16047464?dopt=Abstract

I believe I suffered an H. pylori infection for about twenty years.

To my dismay, I find my doctors don’t seem aware of this research at all, although they seem to me diligent, intelligent, well-educated, and thoroughly good and good-intentioned doctors.

In this regard, there’s no distinction between syntactic burdens and semantic burdens. If mere taxing is the underlying problem, then I’d expect both semantic and syntactic deficits. In fact, I see both.

Here are a few examples of problems of mere difficulty:

1. “yours is none of their business, whereas their business your – part your”

intending: yours is none of their business, whereas you are part of theirs

(complex relation of asymmetry: syntactic or semantic or both)

2. “how to talk about him”

intending: how to talk to him about him

(distinguishing two prepositional relations over the same object: syntactic or semantic or both)

3. “After seven weeks straight of dinner parties even the…extrovert”

hesitating whether to use introvert or extrovert

(comparing a complementary notion in the context of “introvert”: semantic)

4. “forty years old”

intending: forty years back

(described in the present of the perspective of the past relative to the present: semantic)

5. “How long was – how long has – when did he have – how long ago did he have this”

intending: how long ago did he have this

(described in the present of the perspective of the past relative to the present: semantic)

– And here are a bunch of pronoun confusions that also seem to show an inability to go the distance to sort through the indexed referents. Keeping the referents in a discourse, it seems to me, is always a little taxing since language affords only a small handful of pronouns for all the many referents. It takes a bit of added thought, which may be just beyond the threshold of an overtaxed brain:

6. “Have you learnt about the accident himse…itself?”

intending: have you learnt about the accident itself

(repeating the closest pronoun: syntactic or semantic)

7. “There was a tour guide who took her to … took them to…”

intending: [she] took them to…

(repeating the closest referent: semantic)

8. “What do you say when he asked why he’s trying to find her?”

intending: what do you say when he asked why you’re trying to find her?

(repeating closest pronoun: syntactic or semantic)

9. “He claimed he didn’t know anything about him”

intending: didn’t know anything about her

(repeating closest pronoun: syntactic or semantic)

– I’ve got more categories that are consistent with mere weariness, but I need a larger pool of data in those categories. Soon.

For a while, it seemed to me that all my problems were syntactic except for retrieval failures. But now it seems as if they might be able to be redescribed as mostly semantic, even the interference with the formulas.

Some linguists think that the mind stores formulaic phrases, like “whatayaknow” or “gotta go,” as single symbols without internal grammatical parts, as if “whatayaknow” were a bit like a single word: a whole sentence-word like just another part of speech like noun or verb. To speak these, you wouldn’t need any internal syntax — you’d simply use the whole phrase as a unit. My frequent scrambling of them implies that such forumlas are not represented as single symbols, but have syntactic complexity in the mind.

There are a great many such formulas and sentence schemes, so many that it’s possible to get along through much of practical life using little else. In most social interactions we don’t expect intricate ideas, and prefer a least common denominator, avoiding the personal feelings and thoughts that might diverge from the formulaic, both socially and linguistically. Personal conversations, by contrast, often require inventive sentences that can place greater pressure on grammar. It’s harder to express the personal without peculiarities. But those personal conversations don’t play so much a part in the practical world of superficial life.

It might seem hopeful, if formulas were single symbols, that social interaction would be simpler for the aphasic who has trouble with internal syntax. In my case, exactly the opposite often appears. The formulas rush out with the familiarity of ease, but scrambled, sometimes leaving me a bit puzzled when they don’t work right at the end. Here are a few, mostly from phone conversations:

1. “I can’t deal it”

intending: I can’t deal with it

(dropped preposition)

2. “you might try it this one too”

intending: you might try this one too/you might try it too

(pleonastic pronoun — conflation of two forumlas)

3. “this is fuckin a bummer”

intending: this is a fuckin bummer

(restored syntactic integrity)

4. “It’s the oldest my friend”

intending: It’s my oldest friend / friendship

(pleonastic determiner: the/my)

5. “Your boss doesn’t know from his ass…from his elbow”

intending: Your boss doesn’t know his ass from his elbow

(pleonastic preposition)

6. “get out some light”

intending: get some light out (i.e. outside)

7. “just we gotta go”

intending: we just gotta go

(restored formula — as if it were a single, inviolable symbol)

8. “I don’t know where they found.”

intending: I don’t know where I found them

(dropped pronoun)

9. “My neighbors make upstairs a lot of noise”

intending: My neighbors upstairs make a lot of noise

(displaced modifier between noun and verb)

10. “time is too short”

spoken with long hesitation and careful thought to get it right

(insertion into a formula of an intensifier)

11. “For all of my … best friend I haven’t seen him since”

intending: For all the good of having a best friend, I haven’t seen him since

(complex relation between experiencer, two propositions and the matrix statement)

12. “But it won’t severe”

intending: but it won’t be severe

(verb drop — maybe not a formula, but a simple, common form)

1. “frozen dinners…[pause]…Swanson”

intending: TV dinners — I had heard this expression the day before

(compound)

2. “anything named inositol is … really too much”

intending: anything named inositol should arouse skepticism

(complex notion)

3. “[these tourists] figured this guy will … have an answer”

intended: they figured this guy will be sympathetic

(word)

4. cholesterol and pills

intended: medication

(word)

5. “You shouldn’t be flagellating yourself”

intending: you shouldn’t beat yourself up/punish yourself

(formula or word)

6. “If you don’t um…”

intending: if you don’t interview well

(word)

7. “He um … contracted with a detective’

intending: he hired a detective

(word)

8. “not to kill him but to … [thinking: manipulate?]

intending: mutilate

(word)

9. “he stole that beautiful…”

intended: Gainsborough (couldn’t recall Reynolds either)

(name)

10. “a jar … not a jar…of pills…”

intended: bottle (I didn’t believe that this was the correct word when it was suggested — this also happens often)

(word)

Sometime, I want to try to let my speech loose with someone, just to hear what it sounds like. But mostly, I’m guarded.

These are all in the last week since January 27:

1. I can’t go high that

meaning: I can’t go that high

2. You are the best listener [hesitation] I know anyone

meaning: You are the best listener anyone I know

[in conversation in person: two relative clauses]

3.Don’t short yourself

meaning: Dont’ sell yourself short

[alone: formulaic expression, dropped verb replacing adj for verb]

4. I think get most retroactive payments

meaning: I think I can get most retroactive payments

[phone conversation: dropped pronoun, second 'I']

5. You’re none of business

meaning: It’s none of your business

[phone conversation: dropped pronoun]

6. Now don’t fall me down me

meaning: Now don’t let me fall down

[alone: pleonastic pronoun]

7. That’s about of it

meaning: That’s about it

[formulaic expression]

8. because I don’t really work at it to make [hesitate, restart] I don’t try it to make simple

meaning: I don’t really work at making it simple; I don’t try to make it simple

[phone: dropped verbal inflection; scrambled?]

9. they became brothers like me

meaning: they became like brothers to me

[phone:scrambled formulaic expression]

10. you never quite sure

meaning: you’re never quite sure

[dropped verbal clitic]

11. somebody guy I like

meaning: somebody/ some guy I liked

[phone: pleonstic noun?]

12. just what you know, what you needs

meaning: just what you know he needs

[phone: confused pronouns]

13. I was the first person who  [pause, restart] He was the first person that I called him

meaning: He was the first person that i called him

[phone: confused topic with subject]

14. soiree, what’s it called [hesitant] a musicale

meaning: soiree, musicale

[phone: often I doubt my word choice, insisting there is a better, even though it appears that the choice is the right word]

15. you’ll be a great surgery

meaning: you’ll be a great surgeon

[phone: mischoice of derivation]