Intelligibility and recall of sentences spoken by adult and child talkers wearing face masks.

With the Covid-19 pandemic, face masks have become part of our daily lives. While face masks are effective in slowing down the spread of the virus, they also make face-to-face communication more challenging. The present study sought to examine the impact of face masks on listeners' intelligibility and recall of sentences produced by one German native adult and one child talker. In the intelligibility task, German native adult listeners watched video clips of either an adult or a child talker producing sentences with and without a face mask. In a cued-recall experiment, another group of German native listeners watched the same video clips and then completed a cued-recall task. The results showed that face masks significantly affected listeners' intelligibility and recall performance, and this effect was equally true for both talkers. The findings here contribute to the fast growing and urgent research regarding the impact of face masks on communication.

The impact of face masks on the recall of spoken sentences.

The effect of face covering masks on listeners' recall of spoken sentences was investigated. Thirty-two German native listeners watched video recordings of a native speaker producing German sentences with and without a face mask, and then completed a cued-recall task. Listeners recalled significantly fewer words when the sentences had been spoken with a face mask. This might suggest that face masks increase processing demands, which in turn leaves fewer resources for encoding speech in memory. The result is also informative for policy-makers during the COVID-19 pandemic, regarding the impact of face masks on oral communication.