trouble with finding the words you are trying to say

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Its been hard for me just to say the right words when asking for something or talking. This morning, I asked my husband to get my sons shorts off of the stairs, when I meant shoes. I immediately realized I said the wrong word, but it took a few seconds to pull out the correct word. Is this common for Aspergers? It is happening more often than not. Trying to carry on a converstation is difficult when you can't even say a sentence that makes sence.

You might just be a stressed out mom.

Yeah I sometimes swap words for something else, or jumble around the words in a sentence into the wrong order. It definitely happens more when I'm stressed...

I get this, too - although for me, I can't go on with what I'm saying until I find the right word. When I was younger, I would get quite upset - but over the years, I developed a large vocabulary to compensate. So now I'm more likely to have to pause only a few seconds before I get a word that is close to what I want to say.

I've seen the term "Semantic-Pragmatic Disorder" used to describe this phenomenon.

I hate it when this happens. I call it a social freeze.

My SO and I say, "I have words," when this happens.
It's our way of saying, "Hang on while I find it." We actually try not to find the word for the other person, because our minds tend to feel wonky until we sort it out on our own.

I can become very inarticulate like that when talking to myself, so much so that I've wondered whether I'm going senile early. I can also completely lose my thread if my attention wanders off what I'm saying, even for a moment. But the strange thing is, so far it hasn't happened when I'm talking to other people. If the other people are making me very nervous then I have trouble saying much at all, but I suspect that with reasonably friendly people, it's that little bit of social tension that forces me to keep my mind better disciplined. A similar thing used to happen in the band I used to play in......during rehearsals we would often sound disturbingly sloppy, no matter how hard we tried to get it perfect, but once we got up onto a stage something would lock in and we'd find ourselves doing a lot better.

I'm fine when I'm typing stuff as well - perhaps because I'm free to take as long as I like to correct the words and because I've got everything I've written in front of me so I can easily pick up my ideas again if I happen to blank out.

I jumble up words a lot. If I'm at home talking out loud to myself I say the wrong words entirely or out of order, and I have a huge problem explaining something to someone at work (or complaining to a supervisor at work that I'm getting picked on again) and so it makes people think I'm dumb but I'm not. That makes me mad.

Yeah, I find typing so much easier as well. If I could speak like I could type, I wouldn't have half the problems that I do.

It can take as long as three days to find the noun I lost on its way to my mouth.

sometimes i wish i were deaf so i could get away with communicating entirely through text. so much easier to articulate and keep organized when it's in text.

I tend to speak in carefully created scripts, over the years I've learned what to say in certain situations, (which causes people to overestimate my ability to articulate) but when it comes to stressful situations, or confrontations, it gets extremely difficult for me, and I stumble a lot. Or I just repeat myself with different scripts.
If someone trips me up (verbally speaking, not literal tripping) or tells me to reword a phrase or say something over again, my mind gets stuck.

When I've used the wrong word for something around this former friend I used to hang around with, she would light into me about saying things wrong, totally fixate on my mistake and correct me half to death, it seemed. I'd try to tell her I didn't mean to say that word, I got mixed up, but she wouldn't let it go. "Say what you mean the first time!"
Well, I would like to always say what I mean, but it just doesn't always happen!

Don't have to be deaf for that. There's mutism, speech disorders, neurological issues, etc.

Sooo. Keep your hearing, wish for brain damage.

Yes, exactly! I hate it when I'm searching for a word & someone tries to "help."

I expect that people with typical brains also have trouble finding the right word - but I think that people with AS might tend to have a greater feeling of anxiety over the absence of the word we want. For me, I feel that since I lack most of the non-verbal communication skills that people with typical brains possess - words are all I have with which to express myself. So when I can't find the right word, it tends to upset me.

That happens to me all the, er--what's it called? Not kettle. Not asphalt. Not Jehovah's Witness. Oh, yeah...time.

Happens to me all the time.

I jest, but really, it can be a problem.

People who have seen my written communications think I'm intelligent. People who know me strictly through oral communications tend to think I'm slow. It's frustrating to have people who I know are not that bright look at ME like I'M the dummy, just because of my auditory processing issues and slow speech pattern. It's especially frustrating when those people happen to be my supervisors on the rare occasion that I actually have a job.