The impact of face masks on the communication of people with hearing impairment in Jordan during COVID-19

People with hearing impairment (the Deaf, Deafened and Hard-of-hearing) were immensely impacted by COVID-19. They had to figure out the meaning of the new pandemic-related terminology, and they had to suffice with hand gestures in the absence of face expressions and lip movements due to wearing face masks. In this study, we investigated the signs of 25 new and old pandemic related terms in Jordanian Sign Language (JSL), Unified Arab Sign Language (UASL) and International Sign Language (ISL). We found that each new term that spread during the Corona pandemic was signalled using approximately the same sign in all three languages under investigation. On the other hand, it was found that the old terms, whose meaning expanded semantically during the Corona pandemic, were signalled differently. To expand our quest, we conducted a survey of 120 hearing impaired people in Jordan to find out the impact of wearing face masks during the Corona pandemic on sign language users. This data was analysed using Rbrul software. The results showed that communication with either hearing impaired or hearing people was made difficult with the so-called “mask advisory” and “mask mandate”.