• The relationship between chronic alcoholism and auditory processing problems was examined using a central auditory test battery. Fifteen carefully selected alcoholic subjects and 15 age-matched nonalcoholic control subjects were evaluated using pure-tone thresholds, spondee thresholds, speech discrimination, acoustic reflex thresholds, performance-intensity function, Staggered Spondaic Word (SSW) test, Synthetic Sentence Identification (SSI), and temporal summation. Significant differences between the groups were obtained for acoustic reflex measurement, SSW, and SSI. A significant subject-related interaction was obtained for temporal summation measurement. Approximately half of the alcoholics yielded results consistent with brainstem pathologic features.
(Arch Otolaryngol 106:224-229, 1980)