1998 Volume 41 Issue 3 Pages 160-167
A 52-year-old man with central auditory disturbance due to bilateral putamen hemorrhage was presentel. Pure tone audiometry showed no hearing loss, but speech audiometry revealed that he was unable to discriminate monosyllabic words. Neuropsychiatry tests revealed that he comprehended written language and spoken polysyllabic words or sentences, therefore, aphasia was denied. We observed his perceptive ability of environmental sounds was considerably recovered for more than 2 years after putamen hemorrhage. We thought his auditory disturbance should be considered “word deafness”, in particular, “word-sound deafness”. Auditory brainstem response showed no peripheral or brainstem damage. Soon after brain hemorrhage, middle latency response showed no response, but almost normal configurations appeared in proportion to improvement of his perceptive ability of environmental sounds. The lesion of bilateral auditory radiation was detected by MRI, therefore it was conclusioned that word-sound deafness of this patient was due to partial damage of bilateral auditory radiation.
