Multisensory effects of mask wearing on speech intelligibility and the benefit of multilingualism.
Filipa Ponte, Filipa Melo, Inês Duarte and 1 others
PMID 37729326WHAT IT FOUND
Wearing a surgical mask in noisy environments severely reduces speech intelligibility, making it as difficult to understand as losing the visual cues of the speaker's face.
Seeing the speaker's eyes and forehead helps, but does not fully compensate for the mask's acoustic filtering.
Key findings
01In high-noise conditions, sentence recognition accuracy was lowest when the speaker wore a mask, whether visual cues were present or not.
02Removing visual cues (audio-only) had a similarly negative impact on intelligibility as adding a mask, and combining both effects was significantly worse.
03Participants who spoke three languages had significantly higher speech recognition scores in noisy conditions compared to those who spoke only one language.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study used only university students, so results may not apply to older adults or children. All participants had normal hearing, so the findings underestimate the difficulty for patients with hearing impairment. The high-noise condition had a very low signal-to-noise ratio (-24 dB), which may be more extreme than typical clinical settings. Only one type of mask (surgical) was tested.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that seeing a masked speaker's eyes is sufficient for clear communication in noise. The study found that while visual cues help, the mask itself causes a drop in intelligibility comparable to removing the visual cues entirely. The combined effect of mask and noise is severe.