Credit: Karin Higgins/UC Davis
UC Davis students communicate while wearing masks in a lab class held on campus in fall 2020. A new linguistics study shows that people can effectively communicate and be understood while wearing a mask.
Ten months into COVID-19 living, people are adapting to speaking from behind, and understanding others who are wearing, a cloth face mask, University of California, Davis, researchers suggest in a new study.
Researchers in the Department of Linguistics at UC Davis and University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, investigated how well speech is understood from those speaking while wearing a cloth mask. Due to social distancing measures, speakers for the study consisted of individuals from the same household, who recorded sentences while wearing a face mask and not wearing a face mask. The researchers tested how well a separate group of listeners, 63 individuals at UC Davis, could understand these productions. They found that masked speech was not more difficult to understand. And in some cases, understanding was improved.