The Effect of Mask Wearing on Lip-Reading and Audiovisual Speech Perception

Seeing facial speech plays a crucial role in allowing listeners to understand a person's speech. Since the COVID pandemic's outbreak and during the pandemic, the use of facial speech became more difficult because most people routinely wore masks to prevent infection. This study investigates whether and how wearing a mask alters reliance on facial speech for audiovisual speech perception. In this cross-sectional study, we compared the task performance of Japanese young adults in audiovisual speech recognition (i.e., the McGurk effect) and lip-reading between prepandemic and postpandemic groups. For the prepandemic data, we used data from between June and July 2019 from a past study of ours; for the postpandemic data, we collected data from November 2022 to April 2023. The results showed that the amount of McGurk effect (i.e., the amount of reliance on facial speech) in the postpandemic data was comparable to that in prepandemic data. Additionally, there were no significant differences on lip-reading accuracy nor on audiovisual congruent speech recognition. The results imply that, among Japanese young adults, the perceiver's reliance on visual speech as a strategy during audiovisual speech processing did not significantly change between before and after the COVID-19 pandemic.