The impact of face masks on the recall of spoken sentences.

ABSTRACT

The effect of face covering masks on listeners' recall of spoken sentences was investigated. Thirty-two German native listeners watched video recordings of a native speaker producing German sentences with and without a face mask, and then completed a cued-recall task. Listeners recalled significantly fewer words when the sentences had been spoken with a face mask. This might suggest that face masks increase processing demands, which in turn leaves fewer resources for encoding speech in memory. The result is also informative for policy-makers during the COVID-19 pandemic, regarding the impact of face masks on oral communication.