- India restrict Pakistan to 105-8 in Women's T20 World Cup
- England target repeat of Pakistan Test whitewash
- Penrith Panthers win fourth straight NRL title after downing Storm
- Weary Sinner happy for day off after battling into Shanghai last 16
- Pakistan's Masood warns England still a force without Stokes
- Madrid's Carvajal to miss several months after serious knee injury
- Israel pounds Lebanon ahead of Hamas attack anniversary
- Two elephants die in flash flooding in northern Thailand
- Sabalenka targets world number one and Wuhan hat-trick
- Toddler among 4 dead in migrant Channel crossings
- Tunisia votes with Saied set for re-election
- Bagnaia sets 'example' with Japan MotoGP win to cut gap on Martin
- Intense Israeli bombing rocks Beirut ahead of war anniversary
- Mozambique vote: no suspense but some disillusion
- Austrian rapper channels anti-racist rage in Romani hip-hop songs
- Ohtani magic powers Dodgers over Padres in MLB playoff thriller
- Five of the best: Pakistan-England Test thrillers
- Man sets arm on fire as marches across US mark Gaza war anniversary
- Vietnam's young coffee entrepreneurs brew up a revolution
- Trump rallies at site of failed assassination: 'Never quit'
- Too hot by day, Dubai's floodlit beaches are packed at night
- Is music finally reckoning with #MeToo?
- Fans hail Trump's 'guts' as he returns to site of rally shooting
- Lebanon state media says 'very violent' Israeli strikes hit south Beirut
- Guardians maul Tigers, miracle Mets rally in MLB series openers
- Lebanon state media says Israeli strikes hit south Beirut
- Miami on track for MLS record points after win in Toronto
- Madrid beat Villarreal but Carvajal suffers knee injury
- Madrid beat Villarreal to move level with Liga leaders Barcelona
- Monaco take top spot in Ligue 1 with win at Rennes
- French rugby player on rape charge whistled but 'serene' on return
- Madrid beat Villarreal to level Liga leaders Barca
- Thuram treble fires Inter past Torino and up to second
- 'Fight': defiant Trump jets in to site of rally shooting
- Toddler among 3 dead in migrant Channel crossings
- Mexico City's new mayor sworn in with pledges on water, housing
- Israel on alert ahead of Hamas attack anniversary
- Guardians maul Tigers in MLB playoff series opener
- Macron criticises Israel on Gaza, Lebanon operations
- French rugby player whistled but 'serene' on return amid ongoing rape case
- Kovacic stars as Man City sink Fulham to get title bid back on track
- Retegui hat-trick fires five-star Atalanta to hammering of Genoa
- Heavyweights Australia, England off to World Cup winning starts
- Visiting UN refugee agency chief decries 'terrible crisis' in Lebanon
- Spinners come to party as England defeat Bangladesh at T20 World Cup
- Search continues for missing in deadly Bosnia floods
- Man City sink Fulham to get title bid back on track
- France's Auradou whistled on Pau return in Perpignan loss amid ongoing rape case
- A 'forgotten' valley in storm-hit North Carolina, desperate for help
- Arsenal hit back in style after Southampton scare
Masks in class -- how damaging to child development?
Two years into the pandemic, concerns around the effect of masks on the linguistic, emotional and social development of children are taking center stage.
In the United States, calls to lift mask mandates at school have multiplied in recent weeks, including within the scientific community, at a time when new cases of Covid-19 are plunging.
Scientific studies have shown that masks do indeed impact children's ability to recognize faces and emotions. As with adults, masks can also interfere with verbal communication. But experts are divided on the long-term effects on children's development.
- Learning language -
The first fear concerns the learning of language, which takes place in the first years of life. Children learn to speak through social interactions, and in particular look at the mouths of adults in order to dissect syllables.
This path being blocked, it seems logical to suppose a harmful effect.
"You do look at faces when you're learning to talk," Diane Paul, of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) told AFP. "But it's not the only way."
Children also learn by listening to the voices and following the gestures and eye movements of those around them. Paul notes that those with visual impairment also learn to speak well -- and that masks are not worn permanently, for example at home.
"At least at this time, there aren't studies that have directly assessed the long term impact of speech and language development when young children interact with adults who wear masks," says the expert.
"But there are studies that demonstrate that children can tune into these different communication cues and gestures when an adult's mouth isn't visible."
A 2021 study demonstrated that infants were able to recognize unique words through a mask, just as well as without. But according to another, conducted in France, masks can interfere with learning to read among children with learning difficulties.
In general, research remains rare on the subject. But, says Paul, "I really do not see any cause for alarm."
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), "the limited available data indicate no clear evidence that masking impairs emotional or language development in children."
The agency recommends masking in public for those aged two and up, while the World Health Organization suggests the age of five.
- Social and emotional development -
But among psychiatrists, the story is a little different.
"More important is the emotional side," says Manfred Spitzer, who's also a specialist in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Ulm in Germany. He notes that the first thing lost with a mask is the sight of a smile.
"In educational settings, there is a lot of implicit feedback back and forth between teacher and child," he told AFP.
"If you impair this ongoing communication, you will certainly interfere with successful teaching."
Fears also relate to the ability to form social ties. Numerous studies have shown that masks make it more difficult to identify faces and emotions, including -- or even more -- among the youngest.
But conclusions about the consequences differ.
A study of children aged seven to 13, published in the journal PLOS One, confirmed that emotions (fear, sadness, anger) were less well identified when a person wore a mask -- but with similar results compared to wearing sunglasses.
It concluded that "masks are unlikely to dramatically impair children's social interactions in their everyday lives."
Yet other work, published in Frontiers in Psychology, has shown that performance in identifying the emotions of masked people dropped significantly between ages three and five, results that "suggest that we live in a time that may potentially affect the development of social and emotional reasoning," the authors said.
Carol Vidal, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University, said that she's concerned at a societal level, though parents shouldn't panic.
Vidal is part of a group of medics and scholars called "Urgency of normal" calling for the lifting of compulsory masking at school, where it's hard to maintain the stringent use of masks anyway.
"I just think they're not necessary at this point in the pandemic, knowing what we know about the risks for kids in terms of Covid, and knowing that we all have access to vaccinations, and that if we're concerned about our health we can wear N95s (high-caliber masks)," she tells AFP.
It boils down to balancing risks and benefits, she stresses. The downsides of masks "might not be dramatic in the sense that you might not have effects right away, but I think we have to be careful," said Vidal.
S.F.Warren--AMWN