Impact of face masks on speech comprehension

For most people, effective speech comprehension is of crucial importance in their social and professional life. In difficult hearing situations and particularly for hearing-impaired people (1.3 billion according to the WHO), visual perception, primarily of lip movements, is an important 'hearing aid'. The wearing of face masks to reduce the transmission of SARS-CoV-2, however, covers these lip movements and thus most likely has negative consequences on hearing performance. So far, however, there has not been any empirical evidence on whether and how the face mask policy against SARS-CoV-2 could be troublesome for the hearing-impaired. The approved urgent funding project aims to understand how the lack of lip movement information due to the use of face masks impacts overt (e.g., comprehension, subjective effort) speech-related processes and those inferred from neuronal data (e.g., tracking, physiologically-based estimates of intelligibility and effort).