Time for a Shave? Does facial hair interfere with visual speech intelligibility?

![CDATA[We have good news for those whose facial hair is longer than 3 mm: There is no need to shave! A trend towards reduced intelligibility was found in the beard1 condition (mustache), but this trend was not significantly different from the beard0 (no beard) condition. Moreover, the improvement from the audio-only to the audio-visual intelligibility is larger for beard1 (mustache) than beard0 (no beard). This can be explained with a greater attentiveness of the listeners in the beard1 condition. Listeners who were presented with an impoverished visual signal paid more attention to this visual information, thereby gaining increased intelligibility. The greater attentiveness may also be reflected in the significantly longer reaction time found for beard1. Thus, if you wear a mustache in a noisy auditory environment, please slow down your speaking rate and take a break from time to time, so listeners may process your speech. Moreover, be aware that people may be attracted by and focus on your beard (this might be particularly relevant for politicians). Similar to the findings for intelligibility, listeners showed a non- significant trend towards greater confidence that they had perceived the target word correctly when they saw speakers without any facial hair. Again, politicians might be well advised to consider this, though we leave it to the reader to decide whether most politicians would prefer to be better or less well understood. Based on our data, we were not able to verify whether differences in the shape of the facial hair affect intelligibility. Such an investigation may be carried out in the future with participants who do not mind shaving their facial hair, re-growing it, trimming it, shaving again, re-growing, trimming, and so on, in accordance with the wishes of a bunch of phoneticians interested in visual speech intelligibility or—put more positively—in the name of science.]]