title: Concurrent auditory perception difficulties in older adults with right hemisphere cerebrovascular accident.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Older adults with cerebrovascular accident (CVA) show evidence of auditory and speech perception problems. In present study, it was examined whether these problems are due to impairments of concurrent auditory segregation procedure which is the basic level of auditory scene analysis and auditory organization in auditory scenes with competing sounds.
  
  
  METHODS
  Concurrent auditory segregation using competing sentence test (CST) and dichotic digits test (DDT) was assessed and compared in 30 male older adults (15 normal and 15 cases with right hemisphere CVA) in the same age groups (60-75 years old). For the CST, participants were presented with target message in one ear and competing message in the other one. The task was to listen to target sentence and repeat back without attention to competing sentence. For the DDT, auditory stimuli were monosyllabic digits presented dichotically and the task was to repeat those.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Comparing mean score of CST and DDT between CVA patients with right hemisphere impairment and normal participants showed statistically significant difference (p=0.001 for CST and p<0.0001 for DDT).
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The present study revealed that abnormal CST and DDT scores of participants with right hemisphere CVA could be related to concurrent segregation difficulties. These findings suggest that low level segregation mechanisms and/or high level attention mechanisms might contribute to the problems.
authors: 1. PhD of Audiology, Department of Audiology, School of Rehabilitation Sciences, Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, Iran. ht6023@gmail.com.
authors: Hossein
authors: H
authors: Talebi
authors: 2. Associate Professor, Department of Audiology, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran. amoossavi@gmail.com.
authors: Abdollah
authors: A
authors: Moossavi
authors: 3. Professor of Statistics, Department of Social Medicine, School of Medicine, Zanjan University of Medical Sciences, Zanjan, Iran. s.faghihzadeh@gmail.com.
authors: Soghrat
authors: S
authors: Faghihzadeh
keywords: Auditory attention; Auditory segregation; Cerebrovascular accident (CVA); Older adults