Wearing a facemask impacts oral communication as it is both a barrier to the acoustic signal and occludes nonverbal cues such as lip movements and facial expressions. However, while past studies have suggested that these factors do not cause significant impediments to comprehension among speakers of the same first language, the current study investigates the impact facemasks have in the context of second language learners. N = 192 participants were divided into three groups of n = 64 and asked to listen to an 89 s speech. To isolate the effects of visual cues on listening comprehension, the same audio recording was used for all experimental groups. Condition One was a video of a speaker with no mask. Condition Two was a video of the same speaker wearing a mask. Condition Three was an audio recording. The significant finding was that participants in the second (masked) condition scored significantly lower on subsequent comprehension quizzes than the other two. Implications to language instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic will be discussed.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the wearing of face masks during all interpersonal contact has become our “new normal.” Though an indispensable part of our daily outings, it is indisputable that masks impede verbal communication by both muffling speech sounds and blocking visual cues (e.g., facial expressions, emotional information) from view. While this impediment might only be minor for people conversing in their first language, the current study sought to investigate the impact that masked speech had on language learners’ comprehension of a second language. A sample of 192 Japanese university students were given a listening task under three conditions: masked speaker, unmasked speaker, and audio only. Results indicated that learners had significantly more difficulty comprehending the speech when viewing a masked speaker, even more so than when they were just listening to voice recording (i.e., with no accompanying picture). We will discuss with attendees current theories of speech perception and listening comprehension which may explain these findings, as well as ideas on how to counteract this effect to communicate more effectively in the classroom while masked.