Face masks affect: How children understand speech

While mask-wearing is no longer required in many locations, it remains in use as a way to limit the spread of Covid-19. One of the criticisms of masks has been that they make communication more difficult. A recent report by the UK Department for Education, for example, suggests that mask wearing during the pandemic caused communication difficulties in classrooms.

However, our new research shows that for people without hearing and language difficulties, the effects of face masks on the understanding of speech are in fact mild. Although face masks slow down our understanding of speech, they rarely lead to misunderstandings.

Masks also do not affect our understanding in all situations. They generally only have an effect when the topic of the conversation is unpredictable. 26 children (aged eight to 12) and 26 adults without hearing or language difficulties took part in our study.

We showed them videos of a person speaking while wearing a cloth face mask and asked them to repeat back the last word of each sentence they had heard.

This allowed us to measure how quickly and how accurately people understand face-masked speech. As well as testing our participants' understanding of masked versus non-masked speech, we also manipulated the video in order to test the audio and visual effects of the mask separately.