ArticleFrontiers in psychology2022
Face Masks Impact Auditory and Audiovisual Consonant Recognition in Children With and Without Hearing Loss.
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 9 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 25 citations in OpenAlex.
- Pandemic Babies: Developmental Outcomes in Preschool-Aged Children Born During the COVID-19 Era.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Risks and benefits of face masks in children.Frontiers in pediatrics · 2026Review
- Effects of talker gender and face masks on the speech recognition of 6-year-old children in a classroom.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- Consonant aspiration in Mandarin-speaking children: a developmental perspective from perception and production.Frontiers in pediatrics · 2024Article
- Effects on communication due to face mask use: an integrative review.Revista brasileira de enfermagem · 2023Review
- Where on the face do we look during phonemic restoration: An eye-tracking study.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Face masking for children - time to reconsider.The Journal of infection · 2022Review
- Early Word Segmentation Behind the Mask.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Performance in an Audiovisual Selective Attention Task Using Speech-Like Stimuli Depends on the Talker Identities, But Not Temporal Coherence.Trends in hearingArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Teachers and students are wearing face masks in many classrooms to limit the spread of the coronavirus. Face masks disrupt speech understanding by concealing lip-reading cues and reducing transmission of high-frequency acoustic speech content. Transparent masks provide greater access to visual speech cues than opaque masks but tend to cause greater acoustic attenuation. This study examined the effects of four types of face masks on auditory-only and audiovisual speech recognition in 18 children with bilateral hearing loss, 16 children with normal hearing, and 38 adults with normal hearing tested in their homes, as well as 15 adults with normal hearing tested in the laboratory. Stimuli simulated the acoustic attenuation and visual obstruction caused by four different face masks: hospital, fabric, and two transparent masks. Participants tested in their homes completed auditory-only and audiovisual consonant recognition tests with speech-spectrum noise at 0 dB SNR. Adults tested in the lab completed the same tests at 0 and/or -10 dB SNR. A subset of participants from each group completed a visual-only consonant recognition test with no mask. Consonant recognition accuracy and transmission of three phonetic features (place of articulation, manner of articulation, and voicing) were analyzed using linear mixed-effects models. Children with hearing loss identified consonants less accurately than children with normal hearing and adults with normal hearing tested at 0 dB SNR. However, all the groups were similarly impacted by face masks. Under auditory-only conditions, results were consistent with the pattern of high-frequency acoustic attenuation; hospital masks had the least impact on performance. Under audiovisual conditions, transparent masks had less impact on performance than opaque masks. High-frequency attenuation and visual obstruction had the greatest impact on place perception. The latter finding was consistent with the visual-only feature transmission data. These results suggest that the combination of noise and face masks negatively impacts speech understanding in children. The best mask for promoting speech understanding in noisy environments depend on whether visual cues will be accessible: hospital masks are best under auditory-only conditions, but well-fit transparent masks are best when listeners have a clear, consistent view of the talker's face.
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Registered trials
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