Pediatric Audiology Services

• Hearing evaluations, including both screening and diagnostic testing.
• Auditory Processing Evaluations and Treatment.
• Hearing aid fittings, verification, care & maintenance and monitoring.
• FM and other assistive hearing technologies for the home and classroom
• Collaboration with school professionals on classroom hearing accommodations.
• Collaboration with physicians, early intervention, speech pathology, community, and other service providers.
• Custom molds for swimming, MP3 earbuds for safe listening, sleep plugs, and many other types.
• Healthy hearing education including hearing protection both custom and non-custom options
• Friendly, accessible information regarding your rights as parents and your child’s rights under the law as it relates to hearing access in the schools. We help you advocate for your child.

• Tympanometry – The testing of the middle ear and eardrum by creating variations of air pressure in the ear canal. This can determine if there is a blockage impeding sound.
• Acoustic Reflexes – The testing of the neural loop – testing the integrity of the connections between the inner ear to the brain stem, and back to the middle ear system. This test looks very similar to Tympanometry, but is testing a different part of your child’s hearing anatomy.
• Otoacoustic Emissions – A test involving the cochlea, recording the motion of the cochlea’s sensory hair cells as they respond to auditory stimulation. A small probe tip is placed in the ear canal. The response to sounds is then recorded.
• Audiometry – The traditional “booth beep test”, where your child responds to varying frequencies and volumes in a soundproof booth. These are a few types of audiometry testing we perform:

• Behavioral Audiometry: For infants aged birth to six-eight months old – how your baby responds to sounds, such as startling or turning their head, is recorded and analyzed.
• Visual Reinforcement: For infants aged six-eight months and older – your child is trained to look toward a sound source. When your child gives a correct response, he or she is “rewarded” with a visual reinforcement (a toy lighting up, etc.)
• Conditioned Play: For toddlers and preschoolers, aged two to four, your child is trained to perform an activity when a sound is heard. We commonly refer to this type of testing as a “sound game.” Once your child learns how to “play,” testing gets underway.
• Conventional Audiometry: For children aged five and older, your child raises their hand or gives a verbal response when they hear the sound stimulus.

To provide a complete auditory processing assessment, we not only administer auditory processing tests but also gather assessment data from the patient, family and professionals who have worked with the individual. It is essential to rule out hearing loss and other developmental and life factors as potential contributors to a person’s language comprehension, language generation and attention regulation difficulties. Referral for a thorough audiological assessment is recommended to address whether even mild hearing loss may be interfering with a patient’s auditory processing and related communication and academic learning progress.

Testing via iPad

Children are assessed using an automated testing application on the clinic’s iPad via the acoustic pioneer software. Children often find this testing pleasant as the graphics are fun and bright even though the tasks can be quite difficult. This assessment tests a variety of basic auditory skills. Research literature indicates that these skills are important for higher level abilities such as developing and understanding language, phonemic awareness, phonics, reading abilities, and other skills that are important for classroom learning such as, hearing speech amongst noise and auditory memory.

Testing under insert earphones in soundbooth
Three tests are given to children to investigate auditory processing abilities. The ability to obtain speech in the presence of competing, ipsilateral noise is assessed using W-22 words with a 5dB SNR (with speech slightly louder than background noise). The ability to integrate information presented to both ears simultaneously ismeasured using the Staggered Spondaic Word test (SSW). Finally, phonemic awareness is assessed using the Phonemic Synthesis Test.