Paediatric hearing assessment

Children’s Hearing Tests

If you suspect your child has hearing loss, don’t delay. Book them in for a hearing test.

paediatric assessment for girl at school

Speech and language development

Language is learned through exposure to sound. Children pick up words they hear in their environment. But language development is not the only thing that depends on your child’s ability to hear. Their listening ability influences how they learn to read, write and understand the world around them, including other people.

Hearing loss negatively impacts listening ability. This is why hearing loss will greatly influence a child’s social skills as well as speech and language development.

To develop spoken language, children must be able to hear speech sounds clearly. If your child suffers from hearing loss, their basic language development will be affected. As your child grows, their listening environments change depending of different life stages, from infancy, to nursery through the school years and beyond. A hearing loss will impact their life differently at each stage.

Take action

If you suspect your child has hearing loss, don’t delay. Book them in for a hearing test.

We offer comprehensive hearing assessment for children over the age of 4 years. Results will be reported to the child’s GP on the same day.

Since audiometry is a subjective test, children need to be carefully taught the testing routine before useful results can be obtained.

For this age group, we still use head phones and pure tones presented using a similar method to adults, however, rather than responding using a button, we will often use a more engaging response technique known as Play Audiometry.

Play Audiometry involves a play task (eg the child placing a coloured peg into a board after hearing a test tone through the headphones). The test usually takes about 15-20 minutes.

Speech Audiometry will also be performed to determine how the child hears different speech sounds.

Careful observation of the child is important to ensure a consistent response state and reliable results.