OLAKS language material
OLAKS language material
New speech material for audiological and psycholinguistic measurements
The Oldenburg Linguistically and Audiologically Controlled Sentences (OLAKS), which were developed as part of the DFG-funded AULIN (AUdiology & LINguistics) project, have recently become available as new language material for audiological and psycholinguistic measurements. The OLAKS material consists of seven different sentence types (each with 40 sentences), which vary in their syntactic complexity. The special feature of the sentences is that they are almost homogeneous within a sentence type from both a linguistic and audiological point of view. For example, attention was paid to the number of syllables and words, word choice and phonetic balance. In addition, very complex optimisation measurements were carried out to ensure the same acoustic intelligibility of the sentences within a sentence type.
Examples of OLAKS sentence types
| Subject-verb-object sentences: | The nice teacher hugs the fat gardener. |
| Object-verb-subject sentences: | The nice teacher hugs the fat gardener. |
| Briefly ambiguous object-verb-subject sentences: | The fat gardener hugs the nice teacher. |
| Subject-relative sentences: | The diver who paints the magicians is trembling. |
| Object relative clauses: | The diver the wizards are painting is shivering. |
| Briefly ambiguous subject relative clauses: | The penguins who are painting the giraffe are laughing. |
| Briefly ambiguous object relative clauses: | The penguins that the giraffe is painting are laughing. |
The OLAKS material can be used for speech intelligibility measurements, reaction time measurements and for eye tracking (measurements of eye movements). The material makes it possible to analyse the influence of linguistic complexity on speech comprehension in speech intelligibility measurements - taking into account hearing ability and individual cognitive abilities as well as different background noises. Reaction time measurements and eye tracking, on the other hand, are intended to clarify when comprehension problems occur in a sentence due to syntactic complexity. To this end, images matching the sentences were developed for the eye tracking experiment, which can be presented during the measurement.
Example images
  |   |
| The dear dragon catches the big panda. | The diver who paints the magicians is trembling. |
In the future, the OLAKS material could be used for hearing aid evaluation (e.g. measurements of hearing effort in hearing aid wearers) and for investigations of speech processing in different subject groups (e.g. for the diagnosis of speech development disorders), among other things. [30.03.2012]