Perceiving Speech Produced with Face Masks in Competing Talker Environments

This paper examines the perception of speech produced with face masks in everyday multi-talker environments. Three groups of participants listened to English target sentences produced with or without a face mask in the presence of English or Lithuanian competing speech. Participants were monolingual English listeners, and second language English listeners with either Lithuanian or Mandarin Chinese as first language (L1). Lithuanian listeners also completed the experiment with Lithuanian target sentences. Participants were generally more accurate perceiving sentences produced without a face mask, and when listening in L1. Competing speech in a language matching the target lowered perception accuracy. Exceptionally, only when Lithuanian participants (with both English and Lithuanian knowledge) listened for Lithuanian targets was there no added challenge from matching language of target and competing speech. We conclude that acoustic distortions from face masks present an across-the-board difficulty while linguistic knowledge can reduce distraction from competing speech