PURPOSE The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has prompted changes to child assessment procedures in schools such as the use of face masks by assessors. Research with adults suggests that face masks diminish performance on speech processing and comprehension tasks, yet little is known about how assessor masking affects child performance. Therefore, we asked whether assessor masking impacts children's performance on a widely used, individually administered oral language assessment and if impacts vary by child home language background. METHOD A total of 96 kindergartners (5-7 years old, n = 45 with a home language other than English) were administered items from the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals Preschool-Second Edition Recalling Sentences subtest under two conditions: with and without the assessor wearing a face mask. Regression analysis was used to determine if children scored significantly lower in the masked condition and if the effect of masking depended on home language background. RESULTS Contrary to expectations, we found no evidence that students scored systematically differently in the masked condition. Children with a home language other than English scored lower overall, but masking did not increase the gap in scores by language background. CONCLUSIONS Our results suggest that children's performance on oral language measures is not adversely affected by assessor masking and imply that valid measurements of students' language skills may be obtained in masked conditions. While masking might decrease some of the social determinants of communication (e.g., recognition of emotions), masking in this experiment did not appear to detract from children's ability to hear and immediately recall verbal information. SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.23567463.

中文翻译：

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评估员掩蔽是否会影响幼儿园学生的口语测试表现？针对来自不同家庭语言背景的儿童进行的 COVID-19 时代实验。

目的 持续的 COVID-19 大流行促使学校对儿童评估程序进行了改变，例如评估人员使用口罩。对成年人的研究表明，口罩会降低语音处理和理解任务的表现，但人们对评估者的口罩如何影响儿童的表现知之甚少。因此，我们询问评估者掩蔽是否会影响儿童在广泛使用的、单独进行的口语评估中的表现，以及影响是否因儿童家庭语言背景而异。方法 共有 96 名幼儿园儿童（5-7 岁，n = 45，母语不是英语）在两种条件下进行了学前语言基础临床评估第二版回忆句子分测验的项目：有评估员和没有评估员戴着口罩。回归分析用于确定儿童在蒙蔽条件下的得分是否显着较低，以及蒙蔽的效果是否取决于家庭语言背景。结果与预期相反，我们没有发现任何证据表明学生在蒙面条件下的得分存在系统性差异。使用英语以外的母语的儿童总体得分较低，但掩蔽并没有增加不同语言背景的得分差距。结论 我们的结果表明，儿童在口语测量中的表现不会受到评估者掩蔽的不利影响，并且意味着在掩蔽条件下可以获得对学生语言技能的有效测量。虽然掩蔽可能会降低沟通的一些社会决定因素（例如，对情绪的识别），但本实验中的掩蔽似乎并没有降低儿童听到并立即回忆口头信息的能力。补充材料 https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.23567463。