Factors influencing sentence intelligibility in noise

The goal of this thesis is to increase comparability, accuracy, and diagnostical benefit of sentence intelligibility tests within one language and to give suggestions for realizing comparable sentence intelligibility tests across languages. Sentence intelligibility tests are either composed of meaningful or syntactically fixed, but semantically unpredictable sentences. The second type was investigated in detail in this thesis. It is available in Swedish, German, and Danish. The development, optimization, and evaluation of the Danish test is presented. The comparability of these sentence intelligibility tests across languages was investigated. A large number of tests was conducted employing a systematic parameter variation to study the influence of various test parameters on the outcome of a sentence test and its comparability within one language (i.e. German). Fluctuating interfering noises were found to differentiate best between different degrees of hearing loss. Therefore, these noises were investigated in more detail. In order to better understand the mechanism of sentence intelligibility in fluctuating noise, it was modeled with different approaches. The presented two-stage model that calculates the intelligibility of sub-word units at different signal-to-noise ratios with consideration of context effects models speech intelligibility in fluctuating noise best. Taken together, the sentence tests and measurement procedures recommended in this thesis appear to yield the highest practically achievable comparability within and across languages.

Level thesis:degree_level

thesis.doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher

Universität Oldenburg

Year

2003

Author dc:creator

• Wagener, Kirsten Carola

• [Keine Schlagwörter von Autor/in vergeben.]

Repository record source_url

http://oops.uni-oldenburg.de/258

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:oops.uni-oldenburg.de:258