Face-Masked Speech Intelligibility: The Influence of Speaking Style, Visual Information, and Background Noise

Pycha, Anne; Cohn, Michelle; Zellou, Georgia

doi:10.3389/fcomm.2022.874215

Cited by 13 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 59 publications

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“…Further researchers examined this effect in a positive-emotional speech in multi-talker babble (Cohn, 2021). Similar to Pycha and colleagues’ (2022) findings, listeners’ intelligibility was not affected by a fabric face mask during clear speech; however, intelligibility was affected by the presence of a face mask in casual speech. The authors suggested that “emotional” and “casual” speech styles are not produced with the intent to be intelligible to listeners; therefore, the presence of a face mask would further hinder a listener’s speech intelligibility.…”

Section: Face Maskssupporting

confidence: 82%

“…Research conducted by Smiljanic and colleagues (2021) further examined this effect with native- and non-native speakers. The results were similar to Pycha and colleagues (2022) in that listeners were as accurate in a masked word recognition task as they were under an unmasked condition in optimal listening conditions (i.e., clear speech presented under quiet listening conditions). Masks tended to affect non-native speech processing at easier noise levels.…”

Section: Face Maskssupporting

confidence: 80%

“…Therefore, the presence of face masks may affect careful and causal speech differently. Indeed, other researchers have examined the combined impact of face masks and speech style on language processing to investigate the intelligibility of face-masked speech (Pycha et al, 2022). Listeners completed a word identification task to stimuli presented in different signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), in clear and casual speaking styles, and under both masked and unmasked conditions.…”

Section: Face Masksmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Examining listeners’ perception of spoken words with different face masks

Cox

Tuft

Morich

et al. 2023

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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The COVID-19 pandemic made face masks part of daily life. While masks protect against the virus, it is important to understand the impact masks have on listeners’ recognition of spoken words. We examined spoken word recognition in three different mask conditions (no mask; cloth mask; Kn95 mask) and in both easy (low density, high phonotactic probability) and hard (high density, low phonotactic probability) words in a lexical decision task. In Experiment 1, participants heard all words and nonwords in all three mask conditions. In Experiment 2, participants heard each word and nonword only once in one of the mask conditions. The reaction time and accuracy results were consistent between Experiments 1 and 2. The pattern of results was such that the no mask condition produced the fastest and most accurate responses followed by the Kn95 mask condition and the cloth mask condition, respectively. Furthermore, there was a trend toward a speed-accuracy tradeoff with Word Type. Easy words produced faster but less accurate responses relative to hard words. The finding that cloth masks had a more detrimental impact on spoken word recognition than Kn95 masks is consistent with previous research, and the current results further demonstrate that this effect extends to individual word recognition tasks with only audio presentation.

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Section: Face Maskssupporting

confidence: 82%

Section: Face Maskssupporting

confidence: 80%

Section: Face Masksmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Examining listeners’ perception of spoken words with different face masks

Cox

Tuft

Morich

et al. 2023

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Similar studies on globally accented speech and speaker guises (e.g. Rubin 1992, Yi et al 2013, Babel & Russell 2015, McGowan 2015, Pycha et al 2022 all point to a similar conclusion, namely, that guises affect listeners' overall interpretation of the speech signal.…”

Section: 2mentioning

confidence: 72%

Listener beliefs and perceptual learning: Differences between device and human guises

Zellou,

Cohn,

Pycha

2023

lan

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Listeners have a remarkable ability to adapt to novel speech patterns, such as a new accent or an idiosyncratic pronunciation. In almost all of the previous studies examining this phenomenon, the participating listeners had reason to believe that the speech signal was produced by a human being. However, people are increasingly interacting with voice-activated artificially intelligent (voice-AI) devices that produce speech using text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. Will listeners also adapt to novel speech input when they believe it is produced by a device? Across three experiments, we investigate this question by exposing American English listeners to shifted pronunciations accompanied by either a ‘human’ or a ‘device’ guise and testing how this exposure affects their subsequent categorization of vowels. Our results show that listeners exhibit perceptual learning even when they believe the speaker is a device. Furthermore, listeners generalize these adjustments to new talkers, and do so particularly strongly when they believe that both old and new talkers are devices. These results have implications for models of speech perception, theories of human-computer interaction, and the interface between social cognition and linguistic theory.

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“…Therefore, the present results are in line with those obtained by Singh et al (2021) , who also found no differences in terms of word-object identification between speech with mask or without mask. As some researchers have claimed ( Pycha et al, 2022 ; Wermelinger et al, 2022 ), speakers might modify their language production in the presence of a physical barrier, namely a face mask, in order to make their speech more intelligible. In fact, previous findings have already shown that speakers tend to increase their speech quality (i.e., speech rate, pitch, length of words, etc.)…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language acquisition in a post-pandemic context: the impact of measures against COVID-19 on early language development

et al. 2023

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Language acquisition is influenced by the quality and quantity of input that language learners receive. In particular, early language development has been said to rely on the acoustic speech stream, as well as on language-related visual information, such as the cues provided by the mouth of interlocutors. Furthermore, children’s expressive language skills are also influenced by the variability of interlocutors that provided the input. The COVID-19 pandemic has offered an unprecedented opportunity to explore the way these input factors affect language development. On the one hand, the pervasive use of masks diminishes the quality of speech, while it also reduces visual cues to language. On the other hand, lockdowns and restrictions regarding social gatherings have considerably limited the amount of interlocutor variability in children’s input. The present study aims at analyzing the effects of the pandemic measures against COVID-19 on early language development. To this end, 41 children born in 2019 and 2020 were compared with 41 children born before 2012 using the Catalan adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDIs). Results do not show significant differences in vocabulary between pre- and post-Covid children, although there is a tendency for children with lower vocabulary levels to be in the post-Covid group. Furthermore, a relationship was found between interlocutor variability and participants’ vocabulary, indicating that those participants with fewer opportunities for socio-communicative diversity showed lower expressive vocabulary scores. These results reinforce other recent findings regarding input factors and their impact on early language learning.

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Face-Masked Speech Intelligibility: The Influence of Speaking Style, Visual Information, and Background Noise

Cited by 13 publications

References 59 publications

Examining listeners’ perception of spoken words with different face masks

Examining listeners’ perception of spoken words with different face masks

Listener beliefs and perceptual learning: Differences between device and human guises

Language acquisition in a post-pandemic context: the impact of measures against COVID-19 on early language development

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