The last few months have been particularly hard on disabled people and a part of this are the barriers that PPE brings to many of them in terms of their communication. While PPE is of course vital in keeping everyone safe during this pandemic, many disabled people rely on lip-reading and facial expression to communicate, which means masks present themselves as a big challenge. Aside from wearing transparent masks, the use of clear speech could be an additional solution to combat the effects of wearing face masks and could further improve speech intelligibility. Clear speech, known as listener-oriented clear speech, is a type of speaking style adaptation in which talkers adjust their output in response to communication challenges, such as talking to a listener who has difficulty understanding (i.e., individuals with hearing impairments or second language learners) ( Smiljanić and Bradlow, 2009; Calandruccio et al., 2010). It has been well-established that clear speech enhances speech intelligibility by increasing acoustic-articulatory outcomes ( Smiljanić and Bradlow, 2009; Cooke et al., 2014; Smiljanic and Gilbert, 2017a, b). Clear speech has been shown to improve speech intelligibility in the various populations: second language learners ( Bradlow and Bent, 2002), learning-impaired children ( Bradlow et al., 2003), individuals with hearing loss ( Ferguson, 2012; Ferguson and Quené, 2014), children with cochlear implants (CIs) ( Smiljanic and Sladen, 2013), and adult with CIs ( Rodman et al., 2020) even though the intelligibility enhancement of clear speech varies depending on the listeners groups ( Ferguson and Quené, 2014; Smiljanic and Gilbert, 2017a, b) and contexts ( Van Engen et al., 2014). With accumulated evidence of clear speech enhancement for speech intelligibility, we expect clear speech benefits to improve overall communication in the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the dissociation between dynamic and static features encoded by the dorsal and ventral streams respectively, one could argue that such a model cannot account for our results, being all our stimuli static. However, despite the dorsal stream for faces is indeed typically triggered by dynamic facial expressions, Furl and colleagues 58 demonstrated that the presentation of static emotional expressions—as the ones used in our study—activated the same STS sectors typically activated by dynamic expressions, hypothesizing that static emotional expressions determine an “implied motion”, hence activating the same neuronal population encoding dynamic expressions. Implications Adolphs, R. Recognizing emotion from facial expressions: psychological and neurological mechanisms. Behav. Cogn. Neurosci. Rev. 1, 21–62 (2002). The National Deaf Children's Society are calling on the UK government to review the availability of clear face masks, and asking the public to be aware that deaf people will need greater flexibility and patience in communication while face masks are being worn.

Goeleven, E., De Raedt, R., Leyman, L. & Verschuere, B. The Karolinska directed emotional faces: a validation study. Cogn. Emot. 22, 1094–1118 (2008). A big question mark over these types of masks is how good they are at filtering particles. Unfortunately, we don't know yet as we haven't tested them. The third analysis was aimed at considering which emotions were more affected by the presence/type of mask. For each of the three Conditions (NM, SM, TM), due to the repeated measure design, we performed a Friedman test considering the scores attributed to the four different Emotions (N, H, F, S) as dependent variables. In case of significant effects, a Wilcoxon signed-rank test was applied as post-hoc test to detect differences within different emotions. Nummenmaa, L. & Calvo, M. G. Dissociation between recognition and detection advantage for facial expressions: a meta-analysis. Emotion 15, 243–256 (2015).

Caruana, F. et al. A mirror mechanism for smiling in the anterior cingulate cortex. Emotion 17, 187–190 (2017).

It gives the deaf or hearing impaired access to full facial expression to aid understanding, setting it apart from the limited number of approved surgical masks with a window over the mouth. Dimberg, U., Andréasson, P. & Thunberg, M. Emotional empathy and facial reactions to facial expressions. J. Psychophysiol. 25, 26–31 (2011). Skin that has lost melanin — the pigment that gives color to human skin, hair, and eyes — is usually called hypopigmented skin. If no pigment is present, the skin is diagnosed as depigmented.As a company that was started in 2017 in a response to the need for improved, visual communication for the deaf and hard of hearing community, we immediately understood the critical need for such see-through, transparent masks during this pandemic for many different groups of people.