I've seen this problem pop up a few times. I think it's tied to a bad audio plugin that conflicts between Apple and Adobe software. It seems to happen on only a few machines.
It seems to be with CS 5.5 where an Apple audio PLIST file becomes corrupt. The symptoms are that Premiere Pro will play for a few seconds and stop.
Here's the fix:
- Open Finder and navigate to /YOUR_HD/Library/Preferences
- Move to the Trash the file: com.apple.audio.AggregateDevices.plist
- Relaunch The Program
Hope it helps