ArticleFrontiers in psychology2022
Early Word Segmentation Behind the Mask.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Developmental outcomes in 4-year-old children born in the first COVID-19 lockdown in England: preliminary findings from the Born In COVID Year - Core Lockdown Effects (BICYCLE) study.Archives of disease in childhood · 2026Observational
- Pandemic Babies: Developmental Outcomes in Preschool-Aged Children Born During the COVID-19 Era.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on child development: comparing pre- and post-pandemic developmental process levels.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Annual Research Review: How did COVID-19 affect young children's language environment and language development? A scoping review.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2025Article
- Duration Perception and Reading in Typically Developing Adults and Adults with Developmental Dyslexia: Implications for Assessment and Intervention.European journal of investigation in health, psychology and education · 2024Article
- Effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on infants' development: analyzing the results of developmental assessments at ages 10-11 and 18-24 months.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Language acquisition in a post-pandemic context: the impact of measures against COVID-19 on early language development.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Infants have been shown to rely both on auditory and visual cues when processing speech. We investigated the impact of COVID-related changes, in particular of face masks, in early word segmentation abilities. Following up on our previous study demonstrating that, by 4 months, infants already segmented targets presented auditorily at utterance-edge position, and, using the same visual familiarization paradigm, 7-9-month-old infants performed an auditory and an audiovisual word segmentation experiment in two conditions: without and with an FFP2 face mask. Analysis of acoustic and visual cues showed changes in face-masked speech affecting the amount, weight, and location of cues. Utterance-edge position displayed more salient cues than utterance-medial position, but the cues were attenuated in face-masked speech. Results revealed no evidence for segmentation, not even at edge position, regardless of mask condition and auditory or visual speech presentation. However, in the audiovisual experiment, infants attended more to the screen during the test trials when familiarized with without mask speech. Also, the infants attended more to the mouth and less to the eyes in without mask than with mask. In addition, evidence for an advantage of the utterance-edge position in emerging segmentation abilities was found. Thus, audiovisual information provided some support to developing word segmentation. We compared 7-9-monthers segmentation ability observed in the Butler and Frota pre-COVID study with the current auditory without mask data. Mean looking time for edge was significantly higher than unfamiliar in the pre-COVID study only. Measures of cognitive and language development obtained with the CSBS scales showed that the infants of the current study scored significantly lower than the same-age infants from the CSBS (pre-COVID) normative data. Our results suggest an overall effect of the pandemic on early segmentation abilities and language development, calling for longitudinal studies to determine how development proceeds.
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