Aldholmi, Y. & Almuhawwis, H. (2022) Illusionary Effect of Face Mask on Audio-Visual Speech Intelligibility: A Pilot Study with L2 Arabic Learners. In Proceedings of PAAL2022, Japan, (pp., 51-52).
In this study, we recruited a native Arabic speaker to audiovisually record 20 Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) sentences in a clear style at a normal speech rate, once while wearing a face mask and once without. Then, we presented 10 L2 Arabic learners with the nonmasked auditory stimuli and asked them to rate, on a 1-7 scale, the intelligibility of each sentence. The stimuli were presented in two conditions: match, where 10 were presented with the original nonmasked visual stimuli, and mismatch, where the other 10 were presented with the masked visual stimuli. Listeners tended to rate the sentences in the mismatch condition as less intelligible, demonstrating that speech intelligibility is sensitive not only to the acoustic-phonetic changes caused by masks, as previous studies suggest, but also to the visibility of face masks.
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