Masks: Finding Words without Faces

Sophia Till

A sea of blank faces was all I could see. Vacant eyes loomed over the pieces of fabric that lay beneath them, some even slightly obscuring people’s vision as they looked upon what was their foreseeable new normal. I speak in the past tense and yet, waves of expressionless people roll around cities as we speak and there is no sign of this changing. It was not until earlier this July, when I was sitting in the Barcelona metro and a woman tried to strike up a conversation with me across the carriage, that I truly realised how much I had relied upon the way in which people use facial expressions to convey what they are trying to say. Being stripped of them so suddenly and yet still being confronted by a language with which I was unfamiliar, left me in some kind of dark abyss, feeling lost with no real direction in which to turn.

Barcelona Metro in July 2020. Photo Credit: Sophia Till

It was not until going to Spain that I properly experienced communication with masks; such strict rules had not yet been enforced in England. In Spain, wearing a mask is obligatory in any public space, be it outdoors or not; these rules will not be relaxed until a vaccine is found. Masks are now mandatory in over 50 countries, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. While face coverings are common practice in some countries around the world – perhaps wearing veils for cultural or religious reasons, or the use of medical masks in countries with high air pollution levels – adjusting to a world in which I no longer had the opportunity to witness people’s emotions was quite startling.

This feeling was only heightened by the fact that my level of Spanish is far from that of a native speaker and being in Catalonia, locals initially used Catalan rather than Spanish when talking to me. Many Spanish and Catalan words were (and remain) unknown to me. Having only studied Spanish for several months prior to my trip, more often than not, the way in which someone expressed themselves non-verbally proved vital in my understanding of what they were saying  - in fact, it still does. Moreover, the rapidity with which some speakers can talk is astounding. Speech is also varied; many people speak with different accents or dialects – this is something I came across frequently in Catalonia – adding more difficulties to the mix. When our brain comes into contact with different incoming pieces of verbal information, it makes predictions on what we can expect to hear, that are often reliant on visual cues from our main articulator - the mouth.
The McGurk effect best showcases how we rely upon visuals with regard to speech perception. This illusion occurs when you combine the auditory component of one sound (e.g. /ba/) with the visual of someone pronouncing a different sound (e.g. /ga/), leading to the perception of a third sound (e.g. /da/). When we receive such conflicting evidence, we either resolve the conflict between what we’ve actually heard and what we’d expected to hear, or we make a compromise. Therefore, when masks hide all visual articulatory cues, we have lost an entire source of input to cross check these predictions with.

The panic and the confusion of having to ask someone to repeat what they had said for the second or third time was becoming a more and more familiar feeling to me. Every time a native speaker attempted a conversation with me, I would be aimlessly searching for cues that were no longer there, stabbing in the dark with my answers, in the hope that they made some vague sense. Interactions with people seemed like a game of Russian Roulette: a game of lethal chance - and I certainly was not winning. All of this led me to realise that communication is a holistic process. We rely on all manner of cues to fully understand what someone is trying to convey to us. We do not simply deal with the sound that we hear, but also what we see while that sound is being made. This was not something I had properly reflected on until it was taken away from me.

Not only foreign language learners are affected by this; visual cues are just as important for native speakers. Another example is the role of facial expressions. They are significant for interaction as they engage a number of different cognitive processes that allow us to react and respond both verbally and non-verbally. Communication without this, for everyone, is significantly more challenging – irrespective of whether you are talking in your mother tongue or in a foreign language.

That said, all speakers too, rely on prosodic features. In simpler terms, this means that successful verbal communication relies upon vocal inflection, intonation, tone and rhythm. It is through prosody that we can identify things like sarcasm and irony in speech, or whether what is being said is a statement, question or command. Now more than ever, all onus is put upon how someone speaks, in order to gage what is being said. The use of masks now means that we must over-rely on such features of utterance, which we had formerly not given a second thought. In a world wiped of facial expressions, these vocal cues provide the key to unlocking meaning. This is something I now encounter on the day to day, being back in England. Canyon-sized gaps in foreign vocabulary may no longer be a problem for me, and while now I recognise what is being spoken, I, at times, do not entirely understand it.

Masks look like they will stay for a while and even though we may be robbed of smiling, shocked and sad faces in our endeavour to infer meaning, there are ways around it that get easier with time. Shakespeare said in no uncertain terms that ‘the eyes are the windows to your soul.’ I do not think a statement has ever rung more true. On reflection though, it all seems really rather bizarre that the second-nature manoeuvring of one’s face can be so crucial in deciphering the meaning behind one’s verbal expression.