Face mask type affects audiovisual speech intelligibility and subjective listening effort in young and older adults

Brown, Violet A.; Engen, Kristin J. Van; Peelle, Jonathan E.

doi:10.31234/osf.io/7waj3

Cited by 11 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 22 publications

(23 reference statements)

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“…Additionally, all listeners were in their early twenties except one (one older listener's score was comparable to the other participants). A preprint study revealed an older group of listeners showed lower audiovisual speech intelligibility scores compared to a group of young adults, and the older listeners subjectively rated that they required more effort to listen to talkers who wore masks compared to young adults (Brown et al, 2021 ). These findings suggest that age may affect speech intelligibility scores.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of Wearing Face Masks While Using Different Speaking Styles in Noise on Speech Intelligibility During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Song

2021

Front. Psychol.

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The coronavirus pandemic has resulted in the recommended/required use of face masks in public. The use of a face mask compromises communication, especially in the presence of competing noise. It is crucial to measure the potential effects of wearing face masks on speech intelligibility in noisy environments where excessive background noise can create communication challenges. The effects of wearing transparent face masks and using clear speech to facilitate better verbal communication were evaluated in this study. We evaluated listener word identification scores in the following four conditions: (1) type of mask condition (i.e., no mask, transparent mask, and disposable face mask), (2) presentation mode (i.e., auditory only and audiovisual), (3) speaking style (i.e., conversational speech and clear speech), and (4) with two types of background noise (i.e., speech shaped noise and four-talker babble at −5 signal-to-noise ratio). Results indicate that in the presence of noise, listeners performed less well when the speaker wore a disposable face mask or a transparent mask compared to wearing no mask. Listeners correctly identified more words in the audiovisual presentation when listening to clear speech. Results indicate the combination of face masks and the presence of background noise negatively impact speech intelligibility for listeners. Transparent masks facilitate the ability to understand target sentences by providing visual information. Use of clear speech was shown to alleviate challenging communication situations including compensating for a lack of visual cues and reduced acoustic signals.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of Wearing Face Masks While Using Different Speaking Styles in Noise on Speech Intelligibility During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Song

2021

Front. Psychol.

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“…However, another study with audiovisual speech found significant effects of a surgical face mask in conditions of low (-3 SNR) and high (-9 SNR) background pink noise on sentence intelligibility (Brown et al, 2021). As our study used longer duration audiobooks, our behavioural measurements might have not been precise enough (i.e only two binary unstandardised 'true or false' statements at the end of each trial regarding semantic comprehension) to detect this influence.…”

Section: Face Masks Increase Subjective Listening Difficulty While Speech Comprehension Is Unaffectedmentioning

confidence: 85%

“…The adverse effect of face masks on speech comprehension has been investigated in various studies on a behavioural level (Brown et al, 2021;Giovanelli et al, 2021;Rahne et al, 2021;Toscano & Toscano, 2021;Yi et al, 2021). Despite the overall agreement of the adverse effects of face masks on speech comprehension, it has been unclear which features of speech processing are specifically affected.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Occlusion of lip movements impairs reconstruction of acoustic speech features and higher-level segmentational features in the presence of a distractor speaker

Haider

Suess

Hauswald

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Face masks have become a prevalent measure during the Covid-19 pandemic to counteract the transmission of SARS-CoV 2. An unintended 'side-effect' of face masks is their adverse influence on speech perception especially in challenging listening situations. So far, behavioural studies have not pinpointed exactly which feature(s) of speech processing face masks affect in such listening situations. We conducted an audiovisual (AV) multi-speaker experiment using naturalistic speech (i.e. an audiobook). In half of the trials, the target speaker wore a (surgical) face mask, while we measured the brain activity of normal hearing participants via magnetoencephalography (MEG). A decoding model on the clear AV speech (i.e. no additional speaker and target speaker not wearing a face mask) was trained and used to reconstruct crucial speech features in each condition. We found significant main effects of face masks on the reconstruction of acoustic features, such as the speech envelope and spectral speech features (i.e. pitch and formant frequencies), while reconstruction of higher level features of speech segmentation (phoneme and word onsets) were especially impaired through masks in difficult listening situations, i.e. when a distracting speaker was also presented. Our findings demonstrate the detrimental impact face masks have on listening and speech perception, thus extending previous behavioural results. Supporting the idea of visual facilitation of speech is the fact that we used surgical face masks in our study, which only show mild effects on speech acoustics. This idea is in line with recent research, also by our group, showing that visual cortical regions track spectral modulations. Since hearing impairment usually affects higher frequencies, the detrimental effect of face masks might pose a particular challenge for individuals who likely need the visual information about higher frequencies (e.g. formants) to compensate.

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“…Our results also have implications for listening situations when relevant visual input from the mouth area is obscured, a topic which has gained enormously in significance due to the wide adoption of face masks to counteract the spread of SARS-CoV-2. In general, listening becomes more difficult and performance declines when the mouth area is obscured (Brown et al, 2021; Giovanelli et al, 2021). While face masks may diminish attentional focusing as well as temporal cues, our work suggests that they also deprive the brain of deriving the acoustic TFS from the lip movements especially in the formant frequency range which are modulated near the lips (F2 and F3).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cortical tracking of unheard formant modulations derived from silently presented lip movements and its decline with age

Suess

Hauswald

Reisinger

et al. 2021

Preprint

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In a previous work we showed that the visual cortex tracks acoustic amplitude modulations accompanying lip movements during silently presented visual speech. Whether similar visuo-phonological transformation processes also exist for spectral modulations is unknown, which altogether could support the integration of auditory and visual cues for speech processing. Also, given increasing hearing difficulties in elderly individuals, we were interested in how these processes change as a function of age. Participants watched silent videos of a speaker and paid attention to the lip movements while being seated in the MEG. We found that the visual cortex not only tracks the unheard speech envelope, but also the unheard modulations of resonant frequencies (or formants) and the pitch (or fundamental frequency) linked to the lip movements, a process that is in general related to speech comprehension. Interestingly, only the processing of intelligible unheard formants decreases significantly with age in the visual and also in the cingulate cortex. This is not the case for the processing of the unheard speech envelope, the fundamental frequency or the purely visual information carried by lip movements. These results show that not only the global unheard speech envelope, but also unheard spectral fine-details are transformed from a mere visual to a phonological representation. Aging affects especially the ability to derive spectral dynamics at formant frequencies. Since listening in noisy environments should capitalize on the ability to track spectral fine-details, our results provide a novel focus on compensatory processes in such challenging situations.

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Face mask type affects audiovisual speech intelligibility and subjective listening effort in young and older adults

Cited by 11 publications

References 22 publications

Effects of Wearing Face Masks While Using Different Speaking Styles in Noise on Speech Intelligibility During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Effects of Wearing Face Masks While Using Different Speaking Styles in Noise on Speech Intelligibility During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Occlusion of lip movements impairs reconstruction of acoustic speech features and higher-level segmentational features in the presence of a distractor speaker

Cortical tracking of unheard formant modulations derived from silently presented lip movements and its decline with age

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