ABSTRACT
With the advent of COVID, the wearing of face covering has been obligatory in both medical and everyday life. This paper describes three experiments undertaken to establish the effect of face coverings on speech sound power, speech directivity and speech intelligibility. The experiments used two different approaches: acoustic measurements and word scores. The face coverings assessed were a 'standard blue' surgical mask, a typical fabric mask, a prototype clear mask and a plastic transparent visor. The study showed that non-native English speakers had by far the most difficulty in comprehending English language speech when face coverings were worn during phonetically-balanced word list tests. All the masks were found to noticeably affect speech intelligibility, with the surgical mask having the least detrimental effect. The results are also compared to objective measurements of their physical acoustic characteristics to establish their performance. © 2022 Internoise 2022 - 51st International Congress and Exposition on Noise Control Engineering. All rights reserved.