The Effects of Face Masks and Background Noise on Speech Perception
Date
2023-05
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Publisher
The Ohio State University
Abstract
The current study explored whether the effects of face masks and background noise impact speech perception. Participants were presented with eight short videos, which consisted of the listing of five nonsense words, and were then questioned on how difficult it was to hear the words (hearing difficulty). There was then a multiple-choice test containing the presented words along with three foil words to which they were to pick the words they believed they heard (word recognition). Participants also provided the number of words they believe they guessed correctly (confidence levels). The results indicate that participants had reported feeling less confident at test, experienced reduced speech recognition, and an increase in listening effort (hearing difficulty), all due to the presence of background noise. There was also an effect of masks, but this primarily stemmed from listening to a female speaker with a mask in a noisy environment. The effects of masks disappeared in Experiment 2 when only removing the visual cues in the mask condition, which may suggest that effects of masks in Experiment 1 stem from the masks weakening the auditory stimulus.