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
William  ChoiWilliam Choi*Tianyu  ChuTianyu ChuJiaqing  ZuJiaqing Zu
  • The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong, SAR China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

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

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.