title: The effect of linguistic entropy on speech perception in noise in young and elderly listeners.
abstract: The rationale for a method to quantify the information content of linguistic stimuli, i.e., the linguistic entropy, is developed. The method is an adapted version of the letter-guessing procedure originally devised by Shannon [Bell Syst. Tech. J. 30, 50-64 (1951)]. It is applied to sentences included in a widely used test to measure speech-reception thresholds and originally selected to be approximately equally redundant. Results of a first experiment reveal that this method enables one to detect subtle differences between sentences and sentence lists with respect to linguistic entropy. Results of a second experiment show that (1) in young listeners and with the sentences employed, manipulating linguistic entropy can result in an effect on SRT of approximately 4 dB in terms of signal-to-noise ratio; (2) the range of this effect is approximately the same in elderly listeners.
authors.affiliation: Department of Otolaryngology, Free University Hospital, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: J C
authors.initials: JC
authors.lastname: van Rooij
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Plomp
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009622:Noise; D013060:Speech; D013067:Speech Perception; D013069:Speech Reception Threshold Test / Q000379:methods*