Facemask occlusion's impact on L2 listening comprehension & nbsp;

ABSTRACT

Wearing a facemask impacts oral communication as it is both a barrier to the acoustic signal and occludes nonverbal cues such as lip movements and facial expressions. However, while past studies have suggested that these factors do not cause significant impediments to comprehension among speakers of the same first language, the current study investigates the impact facemasks have in the context of second language learners. N = 192 participants were divided into three groups of n = 64 and asked to listen to an 89 s speech. To isolate the effects of visual cues on listening comprehension, the same audio recording was used for all experimental groups. Condition One was a video of a speaker with no mask. Condition Two was a video of the same speaker wearing a mask. Condition Three was an audio recording. The significant finding was that participants in the second (masked) condition scored significantly lower on subsequent comprehension quizzes than the other two. Implications to language instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic will be discussed.& nbsp;