Acoustic changes in consonants produced with a facemask

The widespread use of surgical facemasks in the post COVID-19 era has raised concerns about their impact on speech communication. As many previous studies focused only on vowel production, the present study aims to explore how surgical mask affects production of consonants. Four stops (/pʰ, p, tʰ, t/) and three fricatives (/s, ɕ, f/) produced by 61 adults (31 males and 30 females) who were native speakers of Mandarin Chinese were obtained. Spectral moment and other acoustic measures including Centre of Gravity (CoG), Standard Deviation (SD), skewness, and kurtosis, and spectral peak, duration, and voice onset time (VOT) were analyzed by using Praat software. Preliminary findings indicated higher CoG values, lower SD, skewness, and kurtosis, and VOT when wearing a facemask. A repeated-measures ANOVA revealed significant effects of facemasks on acoustic features, suggesting that facemasks tended to alter the acoustic properties associated with Mandarin consonants, potentially reducing speech intelligibility.