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ARE consonants and vowels just categories that we invented to help describe
our languages, or are there intrinsic differences between the two sounds that
the brain can recognise? Scientists have just chalked up a point for the second
idea in this long-standing debate.

Alfonso Caramazza at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachussetts, and his
colleagues in Italy were studying two Italian patients who had trouble repeating
words. One, given the name AS, was a 41-year-old woman, and the other was a
52-year-old man called IFA. The language problems of both these patients began
after they suffered strokes.

The researchers gave them a series of tests and found that both were poor at
naming objects, reading and repeating words. But a pattern emerged when they
asked the patients to repeat thousands of words. AS made nearly three times as
many errors on vowels as on consonants, whereas IFA slipped up on consonants
five times more often than on vowels.

Vowels tend to be more 鈥渟onorous鈥� than consonants鈥攖hat is, they open
the vocal apparatus more, sound more resonant and need less pressure to produce.
But some consonants, such as L and R, are quite sonorous as well. If AS was only
having trouble with the sonorous letters, she should trip up over L and R as
well.

In fact, the team found that she was no more likely to make errors on
sonorous consonants than any others. And IFA鈥檚 trouble with consonants did not
relate to how sonorous they were either.

鈥淚t鈥檚 very striking,鈥� says Caramazza. He concludes that because the two
patients with brain damage have these opposite deficits, the brain must file
away vowels and consonants into two categories and process them at different
points in the brain.