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How much COVID-19 face protections influence speech intelligibility in classrooms?

The ongoing pandemic caused by the COVID-19 virus is challenging many aspects of daily life. Several personal protective devices have become essential in our lives. Face protections are mostly used in order to stop the air aerosol coming out of our mouths. Nevertheless, this fact may also have a neg...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Caniato, Marco, Marzi, Arianna, Gasparella, Andrea
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9746872/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36530850
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apacoust.2021.108051
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author Caniato, Marco
Marzi, Arianna
Gasparella, Andrea
author_facet Caniato, Marco
Marzi, Arianna
Gasparella, Andrea
author_sort Caniato, Marco
collection PubMed
description The ongoing pandemic caused by the COVID-19 virus is challenging many aspects of daily life. Several personal protective devices have become essential in our lives. Face protections are mostly used in order to stop the air aerosol coming out of our mouths. Nevertheless, this fact may also have a negative effect on speech transmission both in outdoor and indoor spaces. After a severe lockdown, classes have now started again. The adoption of face protection by teachers is either recommended or mandatory even though this is affecting speech intelligibility and thus students’ comprehension. This study aims to understand how protections may affect the speech transmission in classrooms and how this could be influenced by the several typologies of face protections. An experimental campaign was conducted in a classroom in two different reverberant conditions, measuring and comparing the variation in speech transmission and sound pressure level at different receiver positions. Furthermore, a microphone array was used to investigate the distribution of the indoor sound field, depending on the sound source. Results clearly show how different types of personal protection equipment do affect speech transmission and sound pressure level especially at mid-high frequency and that the source emission lobes vary when wearing certain types of personal devices.
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spelling pubmed-97468722022-12-14 How much COVID-19 face protections influence speech intelligibility in classrooms? Caniato, Marco Marzi, Arianna Gasparella, Andrea Appl Acoust Article The ongoing pandemic caused by the COVID-19 virus is challenging many aspects of daily life. Several personal protective devices have become essential in our lives. Face protections are mostly used in order to stop the air aerosol coming out of our mouths. Nevertheless, this fact may also have a negative effect on speech transmission both in outdoor and indoor spaces. After a severe lockdown, classes have now started again. The adoption of face protection by teachers is either recommended or mandatory even though this is affecting speech intelligibility and thus students’ comprehension. This study aims to understand how protections may affect the speech transmission in classrooms and how this could be influenced by the several typologies of face protections. An experimental campaign was conducted in a classroom in two different reverberant conditions, measuring and comparing the variation in speech transmission and sound pressure level at different receiver positions. Furthermore, a microphone array was used to investigate the distribution of the indoor sound field, depending on the sound source. Results clearly show how different types of personal protection equipment do affect speech transmission and sound pressure level especially at mid-high frequency and that the source emission lobes vary when wearing certain types of personal devices. The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. 2021-07 2021-03-23 /pmc/articles/PMC9746872/ /pubmed/36530850 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apacoust.2021.108051 Text en © 2021 The Authors Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.
spellingShingle Article
Caniato, Marco
Marzi, Arianna
Gasparella, Andrea
How much COVID-19 face protections influence speech intelligibility in classrooms?
title How much COVID-19 face protections influence speech intelligibility in classrooms?
title_full How much COVID-19 face protections influence speech intelligibility in classrooms?
title_fullStr How much COVID-19 face protections influence speech intelligibility in classrooms?
title_full_unstemmed How much COVID-19 face protections influence speech intelligibility in classrooms?
title_short How much COVID-19 face protections influence speech intelligibility in classrooms?
title_sort how much covid-19 face protections influence speech intelligibility in classrooms?
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9746872/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36530850
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apacoust.2021.108051
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