Reply to Are the reported rise in speech-delays due to masked daycare caregivers making you rethink daycare?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote]Stepping back: the concerns here stem from the observation that the bottom half of the face is important for reading emotions, learning to speak, and learning to read. The theory behind this is compelling.

In the study of socioemotional development, the idea of facial expressions conveying emotions goes back to Charles Darwin (in one of his lesser-known books, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals). As adults, it should be obvious from our own experience that we use facial expressions to understand the emotions of others.

This is a skill that develops over childhood (see, e.g., this paper on how kids get better at reading emotions from faces between the ages of 3 and 11). Kids differ in the speed at which they develop this ability; there is literature on how children’s reading of facial expressions correlates with their social skills. This starts early: Infants respond to faces, rapidly learning to distinguish between happy, sad, and other emotions, and can distinguish their mom’s face from others within a short period.

There is also a potential role for facial expressions in language development. Watching how mouths move is part of learning to speak (see, e.g., this paper). And when kids need help with speech issues, being able to observe the movement of their mouth and the mouths of others in pronouncing letters is crucial.

A final argument relates to hearing. There is direct evidence that masks make it difficult to hear the speaker, and that this may be exacerbated for kids in loud classrooms. It stands to some logic that if you are trying to teach a young child to read — or, really, do anything — it is valuable for them to be able to hear you. And social interactions are better if kids can hear each other and be heard by teachers.

Putting all this together, it is reasonable to think that some aspects of learning or social skills may be impacted by masks, and indeed others have argued this. But this isn’t quite the same as direct evidence that masking matters, and it doesn’t tell us about magnitudes. Maybe seeing half a face is almost as good as a whole face. The impacts of hearing on learning may be small.

Large-scale evidence on the particular question of masking in schools and development is lacking and is unlikely to ever appear. One could imagine exploiting differences across schools in mask policies to look at differences in learning outcomes, but you would rapidly realize in doing so that too many other things vary across these schools. There will never be anything convincingly causal.

What we can see is a bit of lab-based evidence on masks directly, especially on emotion-reading. There is, for example, this paper showing that children performed worse on a face-perception test when masks were involved versus without. There’s also this paper — co-authored by a researcher and a 9-year-old — which showed that children had trouble reading emotions from masked faces. Or this one, which showed that masks reduced kids’ ability to read emotions from pictures (though notably, not more than sunglasses).

This type of in-lab analysis for studying language development or learning evolution is less feasible, and there is therefore little we can say directly.

In the end, what we arrive at is a lot of theoretical reasons to think that masking could be somewhat detrimental to social learning and intellectual progress, with the evidence for the former being somewhat stronger. It is nearly impossible to be precise about magnitudes.[/quote]
https://emilyoster.substack.com/p/kids-and-masks[/quote]

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