Science / Medicine : Vowels Clue to Brain Structure

A study of brain-damaged patients has found that the brain may automatically differentiate between vowels and consonants without being taught, an Italian scientist said last week.

Roberto Cubelli of Bologna’s Ospedale Maggiore reported in Nature on studies of two patients who suffered damage to the left side of the brain, which controls writing and spelling abilities. He found that they were impaired only when it came to writing vowels.

When writing words, one patient would get all the consonants in the proper order, but would omit vowels. He would, for example, write “B L G N” when asked to identify the town in which he lived, Bologna. The second patient would use the vowels, but made a large numbers of mistakes in their use, while still getting the consonants correct.

Cubelli thus concluded that the difference between consonants and vowels may not just be a learned distinction, but a “psychological reality” that reflects the structure of the brain.