The way to find it is to find candidate words and try them one by one until you hear something that sounds like you've heard it a hundred times before.
> I also wonder if knowing why I can't do this is useful for NLP.
Yes. I wonder if the inability is acquired or learned or innate? Could you learn to do it? Do you have an aversion to catch phrases and well-used (hackneyed) clichés? Do you prefer to weave your own words into sentences?
I notice you use some odd prepositions in odd orders. For example in your second sentence most people would say "I have real difficulty with fill-in-the-blank tests."
You also wrote "perform at these kinds of tests," which is a place where almost all American native English speakers would use "on" rather than "at".
If I had to guess, you're much less sensitive than the average person to slight variations in word pair frequencies, and you could certainly create a test to test this hypothesis. For example you could choose any n-gram likelihood data derived from well-written English texts, and write a program to measure your ability to distinguish high- from low-frequency word pairs. This should be lower than other people in your peer group.
If you are allowed two words, "real difference".
The way to find it is to find candidate words and try them one by one until you hear something that sounds like you've heard it a hundred times before.
> I also wonder if knowing why I can't do this is useful for NLP.
Yes. I wonder if the inability is acquired or learned or innate? Could you learn to do it? Do you have an aversion to catch phrases and well-used (hackneyed) clichés? Do you prefer to weave your own words into sentences?
I notice you use some odd prepositions in odd orders. For example in your second sentence most people would say "I have real difficulty with fill-in-the-blank tests."
You also wrote "perform at these kinds of tests," which is a place where almost all American native English speakers would use "on" rather than "at".
If I had to guess, you're much less sensitive than the average person to slight variations in word pair frequencies, and you could certainly create a test to test this hypothesis. For example you could choose any n-gram likelihood data derived from well-written English texts, and write a program to measure your ability to distinguish high- from low-frequency word pairs. This should be lower than other people in your peer group.