Abstract
Interactions with talkers wearing face masks have become part of our daily routine since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using an on-line experiment resembling a video conference, we examined the impact of face masks on speech comprehension. Typical-hearing listeners performed a speech-in-noise task while seeing talkers with visible lips, talkers wearing a surgical mask, or just the name of the talker displayed on screen. The target voice was masked by concurrent distracting talkers. We measured performance, confidence and listening effort scores, as well as meta-cognitive monitoring (the ability to adapt self-judgments to actual performance). Hiding the talkers behind a screen or concealing their lips via a face mask led to lower performance, lower confidence scores, and increased perceived effort. Moreover, meta-cognitive monitoring was worse when listening in these conditions compared with listening to an unmasked talker. These findings have implications on everyday communication for typical-hearing individuals and for hearing-impaired populations.
Highlights
From the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of face masks prevented many of us from seeing each other’s lips in everyday interactions
Hiding the talkers behind a screen or concealing their lips via a face mask led to lower performance, lower confidence scores, and increased perceived effort
We mimicked a real multitalker video call to measure the impact of different visual conditions on speech comprehension in typical hearing participants
Summary
From the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of face masks prevented many of us from seeing each other’s lips in everyday interactions. In five normal hearing adults, Hampton et al (2020) reported that word-identification performance drops by 30% to 35% when listening with background noise to a talker wearing a mask, compared with a control condition in which the talker’s face was visible. In these previous studies, the impact of face masks on speech understanding was rarely examined in common everyday life conditions. The impact of concealing the lips (a visual feature) was not observed separately from the impact of voice distortions (an auditory feature) generated by the mask (i.e., transmission loss: Llamas et al, 2009)
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