Speech Perception through Face Masks by Children and Adults

Abstract

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.

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

“…An additional limitation of the current study is that participants were all adults. Recent work (Schwarz et al, 2021) has shown that children also exhibit differences in the way they perceive face-masked speech-and might also make different clear speech adaptations to overcome the mask. Furthermore, the study included only one type of face mask, a fabric face-mask.…”