This is how you can make masked conversations 100% more successful

It’s a daily complication that would have been impossible to predict two years ago. No one anticipated having conversations through face masks on a daily basis, but here we are. As everyone can probably attest at this point, it isn’t exactly easy for two people wearing a face mask to hold an engaging chat. Words become muffled and hard to understand, and every sentence spoken leaves one’s mask just a little further out of position. 

It’s annoying but necessary. Hopefully, we all can agree that a slightly harder time discussing the latest movie or the outcome of the Super Bowl is always a preferable option in comparison to spreading a deadly virus. 

Interestingly, a new study just released by the University of California, Davis finds that as face masks continue to be a part of everyday life people are beginning to adapt their speaking and listening habits accordingly. Researchers say that with the right effort, masked conversations don’t have to be difficult or awkward.

“Strikingly, when speakers are instructed to ‘speak clearly’ while wearing a face-mask, their speech is even better understood by listeners (compared to when the speakers are unmasked),” says lead study author Michelle Cohn, a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow in linguistics at UC Davis, in a release.

“Results from the current study revealed that wearing a fabric face mask does not uniformly affect speech intelligibility across styles. Speakers are dynamically assessing listener difficulty and adapting their ‘clear’ speech accordingly,” she adds.

A unique two-step experiment was carried out for this study. First, a collection of people all living under the same roof agreed to have both their masked and unmasked conversations recorded while at home. Then, those recorded conversations were played back for a separate group of 63 other volunteers. Researchers observed to see how differently that second group of participants heard and understood masked conversations versus unmasked discussions.

Now, the first group of housemates who took part in this study was instructed to hold conversations in three distinct styles: casual, clear, and positive-emotional (happy). Casual would be any usual conversation you have with a friend at a normal volume, clear is indicative of when someone raises their voice a bit to make sure they are heard in a crowded or noisy room, and positive-emotional indicates a happy or jovial chat.

To recreate the conditions of a real-world public conversation, the research team even added some background, ambient noise to the recordings of the original conversations. During the second round of the experiment, all listeners had to do after hearing the recorded conversations was type out the last word they had heard. 

Here’s where the heart of the study’s findings came to light. When individuals spoke casually or in a positive-manner, most participants indeed found it harder to understand what they were saying with a face mask on. However, when participants made a concerted effort to speak clearly there were little to no issues recognizing what was being said. Some were even able to better understand sentences under this condition than words spoken with no mask on at all.

“Further, the results highlight the adaptive nature of human speech, and help us to understand why it is a successful communication tool, even in situations where listening is difficult,” Cohn notes.

The full study can be found here, published in Cognition.