How much COVID-19 face protections influence speech intelligibility in classrooms?

Caniato, Marco; Marzi, Arianna; Gasparella, Andrea

doi:10.1016/j.apacoust.2021.108051

Cited by 44 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…For example, the "Need to allow to see the face" has an important role in the social aspect of sustainability (facilitating comprehension during a conversation and improving safety in certain environments). This requirement is highly debated in the social context; indeed, face masks decrease speech intelligibility and make communication more difficult, especially for people with hearing loss, and few works have been developed to tackle this issue [56][57][58].…”

Section: Mask Development Processmentioning

confidence: 99%

Engineering Design Process of Face Masks Based on Circularity and Life Cycle Assessment in the Constraint of the COVID-19 Pandemic

et al. 2021

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Face masks are currently considered key equipment to protect people against the COVID-19 pandemic. The demand for such devices is considerable, as is the amount of plastic waste generated after their use (approximately 1.6 million tons/day since the outbreak). Even if the sanitary emergency must have the maximum priority, environmental concerns require investigation to find possible mitigation solutions. The aim of this work is to develop an eco-design actions guide that supports the design of dedicated masks, in a manner to reduce the negative impacts of these devices on the environment during the pandemic period. Toward this aim, an environmental assessment based on life cycle assessment and circularity assessment (material circularity indicator) of different types of masks have been carried out on (i) a 3D-printed mask with changeable filters, (ii) a surgical mask, (iii) an FFP2 mask with valve, (iv) an FFP2 mask without valve, and (v) a washable mask. Results highlight how reusable masks (i.e., 3D-printed masks and washable masks) are the most sustainable from a life cycle perspective, drastically reducing the environmental impacts in all categories. The outcomes of the analysis provide a framework to derive a set of eco-design guidelines which have been used to design a new device that couples protection requirements against the virus and environmental sustainability.

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Section: Mask Development Processmentioning

confidence: 99%

Engineering Design Process of Face Masks Based on Circularity and Life Cycle Assessment in the Constraint of the COVID-19 Pandemic

et al. 2021

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“…However, face masks pose issues in everyday listening situations. Face masks have been shown to impair acoustic details of the speech signal in several studies, with N95/FFP2 masks showing quite a strong attenuation in mid to high frequencies, while surgical face masks show only moderate influence on the acoustic speech signal (Caniato et al, 2021;Corey et al, 2020). Confirming this impact behaviourally, Rahne et al (2021) found impaired speech perception in noise when wearing a surgical face mask compared to no mask, while participants performed even worse when using an N95 mask.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 85%

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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“…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). This issue, which should become relevant particularly in noisy situations, may be aggravated by the fact that face masks (especially highly protective ones) impact sound propagation of frequencies between 1600-6000 Hz with a peak around 2000 Hz (Caniato et al, 2021). Thus, face masks diminish relevant formant information in both sensory modalities.…”

Section: Possible Implications For Speech Processing In Challenging Situationsmentioning

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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How much COVID-19 face protections influence speech intelligibility in classrooms?

Cited by 44 publications

References 41 publications

Engineering Design Process of Face Masks Based on Circularity and Life Cycle Assessment in the Constraint of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Engineering Design Process of Face Masks Based on Circularity and Life Cycle Assessment in the Constraint of 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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