Abstract :
Strokes appear to affect central auditory perception in elderly patients. Strokes can cause lesions in the brain, sometimes in the central auditory area, which affects a persons' ability to distinguish between speech and background noise for purposes of listening and conversation. A group of stroke patients' scores on a dichotic competing sentence test, which mimics conversation in typical listening conditions, was compared to the scores of non-stroke patients of similar age. Seventeen of the 25 stroke patients failed the test, compared to only one of 25 non-stroke patient. This suggests that dichotic competing sentence tests may be useful in detecting the presence of central auditory dysfunction in stroke patients.