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…
