The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) medication on auditory skills in clinically depressed subjects. Experimental subjects prescribed an SSRI were tested in a medicated and an unmedicated condition, and the test results were compared. Furthermore, the experimental group was compared with a control group consisting of normal subjects. Test measures included pure tone audiometry, tympanometry, acoustic reflex thresholds, and auditory electrophysiologic measures such as auditory brainstem and auditory late responses. An assessment scale for depression (Beck Depression Inventory-II) was also used. Results indicated statistically significant differences for the BDI-II between the control and experimental groups for both conditions. Electrophysiologic measures indicated a significantly shorter latency for auditory late potential P1 at 55 dBnSL, and a significantly larger amplitude at 45 dBnSL for the N1/P2 component for the unmedicated group. Although the other measures showed trends, they did not reach significance.

Behavioral perceptions and cortical auditory evoked potentials (CAEPs) from native English (N=10) and Spanish speakers (N=10) were recorded for speech stimuli that constitute phonetically relevant categories of voicing. The stimuli were synthesized bilabial stop consonant-vowel syllables in a continuum ranging from/ba/to/pa/that varied in voice onset time (VOT) from 0 to 60ms. Different behavioral perceptions were evidenced by significantly different categorical phonetic boundaries between the two groups (p.05). Peak P1, N1, and P2 response latencies and P1–N1 and N1–P2 amplitudes increased significantly with increasing VOTs (p