Split Is Fetterman's aphasia relevant to his being a Senator?

[Patooka]

For a while there, Queensland politicians were sporting the hawaian shirt and shorts combo whilst talking to the media.

Nah, that's just a reflection of the fact that Queenslanders in general sport the Hawaiian shirt and shorts combo pretty much all the time.

My uncle who lives just outside the Gold Coast likes telling people the further north in Queensland you go the more prominent the sound of banjos becomes.

The Gold Coast is practically New South Wales.

Shit, one suburb of the City of the Gold Coast is literally NSW.

The hilarity is he grew up in Minto in Sydney. He is a bona fide expert on bogans.

 

[bilby]

For a while there, Queensland politicians were sporting the hawaian shirt and shorts combo whilst talking to the media.

Nah, that's just a reflection of the fact that Queenslanders in general sport the Hawaiian shirt and shorts combo pretty much all the time.

My uncle who lives just outside the Gold Coast likes telling people the further north in Queensland you go the more prominent the sound of banjos becomes.

The Gold Coast is practically New South Wales.

Shit, one suburb of the City of the Gold Coast is literally NSW.

The hilarity is he grew up in Minto in Sydney. He is a bona fide expert on bogans.

I live in Logan City. We have more bogans per square inch here than you'd find in Gympie or Rocky - and once you get north of Rocky, it starts going back the other way. Port Douglas is positively yuppified.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I'm really glad to see that his speech has almost completely recovered now. I wonder how much he really needs the laptop to help him understand spoken language. It's interesting to me that he has better access to vocabulary recognition through vision than auditorily, because all languages except ASL and other deaf sign languages are first learned through the auditory-articulatory medium. However, much of our educated and technical vocabulary is acquired at a later stage, when reading becomes the medium through which new vocabulary, especially technical vocabulary, is introduced. My guess is that most of the brain damage occurred in Broca's area, but his brain seems to have repaired itself nicely. Not so many slurs and hesitations now. That would have been a lot more difficult if he were ten years or more older.

There's also the issue that written words can be digested at your own pace, spoken words have to be digested at the speaker's pace.

Back in college I had one professor that I couldn't understand in realtime--I could figure out a sentence but by then I had missed the next one. It was just as well that he had basically nothing worth saying, anyway. The only hard part of the class was keeping track of his errors. Had there been some written transcript to use I certainly would have chosen it over listening to him.

 

[Copernicus]

I'm really glad to see that his speech has almost completely recovered now. I wonder how much he really needs the laptop to help him understand spoken language. It's interesting to me that he has better access to vocabulary recognition through vision than auditorily, because all languages except ASL and other deaf sign languages are first learned through the auditory-articulatory medium. However, much of our educated and technical vocabulary is acquired at a later stage, when reading becomes the medium through which new vocabulary, especially technical vocabulary, is introduced. My guess is that most of the brain damage occurred in Broca's area, but his brain seems to have repaired itself nicely. Not so many slurs and hesitations now. That would have been a lot more difficult if he were ten years or more older.

There's also the issue that written words can be digested at your own pace, spoken words have to be digested at the speaker's pace.

That's true, but the computer screen only displays words in real time sequences. So they can only be digested at the speaker's pace, with an added slight delay for the software to process the acoustic stream and calculate the most likely word sequences.

Back in college I had one professor that I couldn't understand in realtime--I could figure out a sentence but by then I had missed the next one. It was just as well that he had basically nothing worth saying, anyway. The only hard part of the class was keeping track of his errors. Had there been some written transcript to use I certainly would have chosen it over listening to him.

When I taught college courses, I sometimes had students who would ask permission to record my lectures. I have had a blind student once who couldn't see the blackboard, so he wore a kind of muzzle device over his face that allowed him to annotate my lectures vocally without disturbing other students around him.