Journal article
Effects of face masks on acoustic analysis and speech perception: Implications for peri-pandemic protocols
Michelle Magee, Courtney Lewis, Gustavo Noffs, Hannah Reece, Jess CS Chan, Charissa J Zaga, Camille Paynter, Olga Birchall, Sandra Rojas Azocar, Angela Ediriweera, Katherine Kenyon, Marja W Caverlé, Benjamin G Schultz, Adam P Vogel
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America | Acoustical Society of America (ASA) | Published : 2020
DOI: 10.1121/10.0002873
Abstract
Wearing face masks (alongside physical distancing) provides some protection against infection from COVID-19. Face masks can also change how people communicate and subsequently affect speech signal quality. This study investigated how three common face mask types (N95, surgical, and cloth) affected acoustic analysis of speech and perceived intelligibility in healthy subjects. Acoustic measures of timing, frequency, perturbation, and power spectral density were measured. Speech intelligibility and word and sentence accuracy were also examined using the Assessment of Intelligibility of Dysarthric Speech. Mask type impacted the power distribution in frequencies above 3 kHz for the N95 mask, and ..
View full abstractGrants
Awarded by University of Melbourne
Funding Acknowledgements
This work received institutional support from The University of Melbourne, Australia. A.P.V. holds a National Health and Medical Research Council (Australia) Fellowship (#10135683). M.M., C.L., H.R., and G.N. contributed equally to this work. C.L., G.N., O.B., and M.C. are supported by Australian Postgraduate Research Scholarships. C.P. is funded by a joint National Health and Medical Research Council (Australia)/Motor Neuron Disease Research Australia postgraduate scholarship (#1133541). We thank Sam Peterson, Jack Peterson, and Michael Reece for their help in data collection.