Imposed measure of wearing facemasks presented a big challenge for children in different aspects.

"That first year of life is when speech and language are emerging in a major major way," said David Lewkowicz, senior scientist at Haskins Laboratories and a professor adjunct at the Yale Child Study Centre.

Lewkowicz has been researching the importance of visual speech information, or lipreading, in children and babies since long before the pandemic. He co-authored a 2012 study that showed babies a short video of a woman talking and used an eye-tracking device to capture where on the woman's face the babies focused their gaze.

"What we discovered, in a nutshell, was that at four months of age babies were really interested in the eyes of the talker. But then at eight months of age there was a really dramatic shift … where they started to look much more at the mouth region of the person that was talking to them."

As they grow, babies use lipreading as part of speech and language development. This means that for infants who are in day-care settings, and therefore constantly seeing masked caregivers, "there may be some detrimental effects of at least extended exposure [to masks]," Lewkowicz said.

Link to study : “Infants deploy selective attention to the mouth of a talking face when learning speech”

https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1114783109

When people around infants in bilingual households wear masks, it could present an even greater impairment, he said, because these children rely even more on lipreading to differentiate the phonetic sounds between the languages.

Not only reading lips is obviously harder these days, but so is reading emotions. And for children who are still developing their interpersonal skills, masks can pose a challenge in that area as well.

Masks hide not only our emotions, but also our identity at times. The adult ability to recognize a face is reduced by about 15 per cent if the person has a mask covering their nose and mouth, according to a York University study published in December.

But kids may be having an even harder time, according to a second study from the same research team that is currently under review. It indicates school-aged children between six and 14 years old have their face-recognition abilities impaired by about 20 per cent when a mask is present.

Link to study “Face Masks Disrupt Holistic Processing and Face Perception in School-Age Children”

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8818366/

Lewkowicz said there's potential for long-term impacts of mask wearing on face-perception development.

A speech therapist in Palm Beach Florida is sounding the alarm on the CDC’s insistence on mask wearing after noticing a massive uptick in the number of children suffering from speech delays and other mask-induced issues.

 Jaclyn Theek, a clinic director and speech-language pathologist at the Speech and Learning Institute in North Palm Beach told ABC news affiliate WPBF that she saw a whopping 364 percent increase in the number of referrals for children suffering from speech delays in 2021, suggesting mask-wearing may be causing unprecedented damage to healthy childhood development.

“We’ve seen a 364 percent patient increase in patient referrals of babies and toddlers from paediatricians and parents,” Jaclyn Theek, a clinic director and speech-language pathologist at the Speech and Learning Institute in North Palm Beach, Florida told ABC affiliate WPBF.

Theek said that before the beginning of Covid measures became normalized in society, just 5 percent of her clinic’s patients were babies or toddlers; now, that ratio stands at 20 percent.

Sources :

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/children-masks-language-speech-faces-1.5948037

https://www.visiontimes.com/2022/01/31/speech-therapist-sees-more-child-patients-mask-mandates.html

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