significant results

The responses to the puzzle are in, and conclusive. The structure difficult to me is transparent to normal readers. I’m guessing, then, that I’m missing a key piece of syntax, what in formal machine jargon would be an element of the pushdown store, or in the informal jargon of formal languages, an ability to branch in the context-free grammar.

It’s the most interesting bit of information I’ve seen in all these weeks yet. For one thing, several deficits are common to the loss of a pushdown store: garbling of complex compounds like “white tablecloth,” frequent tip-of-the-tongue, common retrieval failures, agrammatical scrambling within the internal soliloquies, possibly the syncopation of verbs — all resemble this difficulty in holding onto the storing of the subject within a relative phrase and its verb separated by a relative clause.

It will also be interesting to see if this will be restored or will remain permanent. If it is permanent, then it is consistent with the hypothesis that the loss of aspects of developmental stage syntax cannot be recreated in adulthood. However, if it is recreated, then either it has been restored to its original state by recovery, or developmental stage syntax can been relearnt in adult. The latter would be surprising, though welcome. Anyway, I know what to work on.