A comparative study on the hearing abilities of about 200 pre-school children was undertaken in order to investigate conformities and differences obtained by test results with pure tone audiometry and the whispered voice test. From these tests it appeared that the whispered voice test is far simpler for screening purposes and more adequate because it also provides information on intelligence, mental attitude for listening and thus on educability. The results further suggest that right ear performance would be optimal for language perception and left ear for pure tones, which would point to selective predominance of the two hemispheres.