How Does a Face Mask Impact Speech Perception?

Abstract

Face masks are mandatory during the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to attenuation of sound energy and loss of visual cues which are important for communication. This study explores how a face mask affects speech performance for individuals with and without hearing loss. Four video recordings (a female speaker with and without a face mask and a male speaker with and without a face mask) were used to examine individuals’ speech performance. The participants completed a listen-and-repeat task while watching four types of video recordings. Acoustic characteristics of speech signals based on mask type (no mask, surgical, and N95) were also examined. The availability of visual cues was beneficial for speech understanding—both groups showed significant improvements in speech perception when they were able to see the speaker without the mask. However, when the speakers were wearing the mask, no statistical significance was observed between no visual cues and visual cues conditions. Findings of the study demonstrate that provision of visual cues is beneficial for speech perception for individuals with normal hearing and hearing impairment. This study adds value to the importance of the use of communication strategies during the pandemic where visual information is lost due to the face mask.

The impact of face masks on face-to-face neural tracking of speech: auditory and visual obstacles

“…Protective face masks have been of fundamental importance during the pandemic of COVID-19; despite that, consequent difficulties in face-to-face communication have been underlined, especially for listeners with hearing impairment (Corey et al, 2020; Homans, Vroegop, 2021). Previous behavioral studies highlighted the impact of face masks in filtering acoustic information, leading to decreased comprehension both in normal hearing and hearing-impaired participants (Choi et al, 2022; Homans Vroegop, 2021; Moon et al, 2022). Also, face masks challenge auditory attention, intelligibility, and memory recall, especially when listening to speech in noise (Rimmele, 2015; Smiljanic et al, 2021).…”

Improving masked communication: the case for transparent masks

“…The impact of face occlusion by masks extends beyond nonverbal communication to verbal communication and speech comprehension. As reviewed by Francis et al (2024) and Marler and Ditton (2021), face masks occlude lip movements and physically dampen the sound (e.g., Bottalico et al, 2020;Cruz et al, 2022;Moon et al, 2022;Zhou et al, 2022) and prosody (Sinagra and Wiener, 2022) of speech. This makes it more difficult for individuals to discriminate speech when the speaker is masked (e.g., Bandaru et al, 2020;Bottalico et al, 2020;Giovanelli et al, 2021;Homans and Vroegop, 2022;Kim and Thompson, 2022;Kumar et al, 2022;Moon et al, 2022;Ritter et al, 2022;Zhou et al, 2022) and results in increased effort required to process speech (Giovanelli et al, 2021;Mendel et al, 2022).…”

“…As reviewed by Francis et al (2024) and Marler and Ditton (2021), face masks occlude lip movements and physically dampen the sound (e.g., Bottalico et al, 2020;Cruz et al, 2022;Moon et al, 2022;Zhou et al, 2022) and prosody (Sinagra and Wiener, 2022) of speech. This makes it more difficult for individuals to discriminate speech when the speaker is masked (e.g., Bandaru et al, 2020;Bottalico et al, 2020;Giovanelli et al, 2021;Homans and Vroegop, 2022;Kim and Thompson, 2022;Kumar et al, 2022;Moon et al, 2022;Ritter et al, 2022;Zhou et al, 2022) and results in increased effort required to process speech (Giovanelli et al, 2021;Mendel et al, 2022). This detriment in verbal comprehension seems to disproportionately impact those with hearing loss (Atcherson et al, 2017;Aguillon-Hernandez et al, 2022;Mendel et al, 2022;Ritter et al, 2022) and is exacerbated when there is background noise competing with the speaker (Kumar et al, 2022).…”

Comparison of speech recognition performance with and without a face mask between a basic and a premium hearing aid in hearing-impaired listeners

“…With the COVID-19 pandemic, due to the mask mandate, communication has become more challenging for individuals with HL [ 16 , 17 ]. Face masks are reported to attenuate mid-to-high frequency and individuals lose access to visual cues [ [18] , [19] , [20] , [21] , [22] ]. Nguyen et al (2021) examined voice characteristics of 16 adults with and without a surgical and a KN95 mask.…”