G-O-H: Indirect Hearing Screening

The GOH Speech Hearing Screening Process is a new, indirect solution for quick and friendly assessment of speech hearing in young children. The procedure was developed in 1984-85 in the Phonetics Laboratory of the Institute of Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 1988 it received Hungarian patent protection (Registration number: 193211). The principle of the procedure is completely different from the traditional sinusoidal method, it uses synthetic speech items made by a formant synthesiser. The spectral content of the synthesized words is carefully planned so they have special acoustic structure, less redundant frequency elements. During the measurement the child hears the synthesised word and has to say back what she/he heard. If the biological hearing mechanism of the child is OK, she/he says back that word that was spoken through the headset. If she/he says another word back, there may have been a problem in the hearing mechanism. The measurement results (answers) are fixed on the GOH evaluation sheet. The right and left ear can be examined separately. One complete measurement takes max. 5 minutes.