Abstract
A 65-year-old right-handed female is reported. She showed pure word deafness and auditory sound agnosia due to bilateral temporal lesions of the cerebrovascular accident. Brain CT-scan revealed a low-density area in the left temporal lobe and a high-density area extending the right temporal lobe.
Neuropsychological and audiological examination demonstrated no aphasic symptoms such as paraphasia, naming disturbance, or reading. Her auditory comprehension was severely involved, and she could neither repeat words nor write from dictation. She could not recognize familiar meaningful non-verbal sounds.
Pure tone audiometry was performed on her admission, but she could not answer constantly, although she seemed to be able to hear. And one months after the onset, she had a hearing loss of 30 to 50dB for 500 to 2000Hz, two months after the onset, 20 to 40dB hearing loss on both side. Auditory brain stem responses showed normal on the right and a little prolongation of I-V latency interval on the left. Middle latency responses and slow vertex responses were all normal.
Her disability to recognize meaningful sounds improved gradually, however, some degree of disability was still detected even two months after the onset.
We also discussed the auditory processing of verbal and non-verbal inputs, and explained the mechanism of pure word deafness and auditory agnosia of this case.
