Young Children Can Learn Words Despite Masked Speakers

A recent study conducted by researchers from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and the University of Grenoble Alpes—Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) has revealed that children as young as two years old are capable of acquiring new vocabulary even when the person speaking to them has their mouth or eyes covered. This discovery provides reassuring news regarding the potential impact of face masks on language development during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The research focused on how children follow gaze and pay attention to objects when introduced to new words. It found that, from the age of two, children can form associations between unfamiliar words and objects irrespective of whether the speaker’s face is fully visible or obscured by masks or accessories like glasses. Consequently, the ability to learn new words does not necessarily depend on visual cues from the speaker’s mouth or eyes but is more related to their focus on the speaker and the object.

The study involved recording the gaze of children aged between 17 and 42 months during a word-learning task under three conditions: with the speaker’s face fully visible, with eyes covered by dark glasses, or with the mouth covered by a surgical mask. Results showed that children learned new words starting at 24 months and that their learning was unaffected by whether the facial features were visible or covered. Instead, better results correlated with gaze-following behaviors—alternating attention between the speaker’s face and the object—regardless of the facial covering.

Interestingly, the children in the study tended to look at the speaker’s eyes more often than their mouth when the face was uncovered, suggesting that children develop the ability to control their visual attention between different facial regions based on the context. This adaptability highlights the importance of social cues and visual exploration in early language learning.

The findings imply that visual exploration of objects, complemented by social understanding and attention, plays a pivotal role in vocabulary acquisition during early childhood. While visual mouth cues may aid more complex speech-processing, they are not essential for the basic task of learning new words in typical development settings. The research also opens pathways for exploring how visual cues from the mouth might benefit children with hearing difficulties, language disorders, or autism spectrum disorders, where integrating mouth movements could be more critical.

Overall, this study suggests an optimistic outlook for language development in contexts where facial coverings are used, indicating that young children are adaptable and capable of effective learning even with limited visual information from facial cues.

Source: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-07-children-words-speakers-masks.html