BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Commun.
Sec. Language Communication
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2025.1582217
Can You Hear Me Clearly? The Differential Effects of Surgical Mask on Cantonese Consonant, Vowel, and Tone Perception
Provisionally accepted
- The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong, SAR China
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This study examined the differential effects of surgical mask on Cantonese consonant, vowel, and tone perception. Forty native Cantonese adults were tested with the Cantonese consonant, vowel, and tone identification tasks. Each task contained four blocks: quiet-no mask, noisy-no mask, quiet-surgical mask, and noisy-surgical mask. Bayesian analyses revealed that the Cantonese listeners identified consonants, vowels, and tones with similar accuracies across the four blocks. However, in the presence of noise, surgical mask was found to increase the response time in identifying vowels. From a theoretical perspective, this study offers a phonological account to explain why surgical mask may impede sentence comprehension. Practically, the findings suggest that surgical mask has little bearing on the ability to accurately identify Cantonese consonants, vowels, and tones, though it affects the efficiency in vowel identification.
Keywords: COVID, face mask, Speech, tone, vowel, consonant, Perception, Cantonese
Received: 24 Feb 2025; Accepted: 29 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Choi, Chu and Zu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: William Choi, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong, SAR China
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