How Face Masks Interfere With Speech Understanding of Normal-Hearing Individuals: Vision Makes the Difference

Conclusions: As expected, speech understanding with face masks was significantly worse than under control conditions. Thus, the speaker's use of face masks leads to a significant deterioration of speech understanding by the normal-hearing listener. The data suggest that these effects may play a role in many everyday situations that typically involve noise.
Source: Otology and Neurotology - Category: ENT & OMF Tags: AUDIOLOGY Source Type: research