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Face masks can cause speech processing difficulties. However, it is unclear to what extent these difficulties are caused by the visual obstruction of the speaker’s mouth or by changes of the acoustic signal, and whether the effects can be found regardless of semantic context. In the present study, children and adults performed a cued shadowing task online, repeating the last word of English sentences. Target words were embedded in sentence-final position and manipulated visually, acoustically, and by semantic context (cloze probability). First results from 16 children and 16 adults suggest that processing language through face masks leads to slower responses in both groups, but visual, acoustic, and semantic cues all significantly reduce the mask effect. Although children were less proficient in predictive speech processing overall, they were still able to use semantic cues to compensate for face mask effects in a similar fashion to adults.

Although the use of morphological information in reading is well-documented, it is unclear whether all readers benefit from the identification of morphemic constituents. Moreover, previous results from inflection priming – in contrast to stem priming – are inconclusive. In this paper we investigate (1) whether inflection priming effects can be found when the stem is not an existing word, and (2) whether morphological effects are dependent on subjects’ reading skills and vocabulary size. We conducted a visual suffix-priming experiment in English with pseudo-inflected nonwords. We found that an inflectional suffix prime facilitated nonword judgment, and this priming effect interacted with the readers’ error rates. Further analysis showed that only subjects with a high error rate and only slow readers displayed morphological priming. We suggest that this reflects activation of morphemes as a sub-lexical strategy when direct mapping of form to meaning is unavailable due to lower orthographic skills.