Auditory measures in clinically depressed individuals. II. Auditory evoked potentials and behavioral speech tests

This is the second paper in a series of two papers comparing auditory measures in depressed and non-depressed individuals. In this paper, we describe the auditory brainstem responses (ABRs), auditory late responses (ALRs) and behavioral speech measures obtained from the same set of 36 individuals as in our previous paper. No changes were made to the inclusion criteria or subject classification. The results indicated a significantly larger amplitude growth with increase in intensity for ABR peak V and ALR peak N1P2 in the unmedicated group compared to the normal group. The unmedicated group performed less favorably on most behavioral speech tests administered compared to the control group, but the difference was significant only in the left ear for the Low Predictability Sentence List of the R-SPIN (Revised-Speech Perception in Noise) test. The mean test scores of the medicated group were closer to the scores of the control group.