Keywords: Auditory discrimination, speech intelligibility, hearing loss, central hearing

Abstract: Although alterations in speech emissions in cerebellar lesions are well known, the effects of this disease and of the cerebellar connection s with the brainstem on speach intelligibility are unknown, since the monosyllabic discrimination is almost always normal in these crises. In this paper, we evaluates the central and peripheral auditory system of subjects without auditory complaints, with cerebellar autorsomical dominant ataxia, in clinical stages E1 and E2 and with atrophic brainstem demonstrated by computerized tomography, with respect to alterations in the VIII nerve branch and its connections, using ordinary audiologic tests, central auditory test (SSI-Synthetic Sentences Intelligibility), brainstem response audiometry (BERA) and decay of stapedium reflex. The speech intelligibility for short phrases (SSI) showed mild alterations in some subjects in one or both ears, only when there was ipsilateral competition, with good correlations between this alteration and BERA. The association of subjective examination an BERA can show us better the subtlety of the speech discrimination disturbances in undertentorial lesions of the central auditory system, and otolaryingologists and audiologists should be alerted to their possible presence.