ABSTRACT
Brain damage may lead to hearing acuity deficits or auditory recognition impairments with spared hearing. These latter syndromes will be the focus of this chapter. Regarding hearing acuity impairments after brain damage, Wernicke and Friedländer (1893) reported the case of a patient who was unable to hear any sound following bitemporal lesions. This rare disorder, called cortical deafness, refers to patients who behave like deaf people, and whose cortical auditory potentials are abolished by bilateral primary to auditory primary area destruction. Griffiths (2002) has recently proposed the term cerebral deafness instead of cortical deafness in reference to the causative lesion: reports following Wernicke and Friedländer (1893) confirmed that cortical deafness is always associated with bilateral lesions affecting the primary auditory area in Heschl's gyrus in the superior temporal gyrus and subcortical extension (Graham, Greenwood, & Lecky, 1980; Mendez & Geehan, 1988; Tanaka, Kamo, Yoshida, & Yamadori, 1991).
