Moving rhythmically can facilitate naturalistic speech perception in a noisy environment

Abstract

The motor system is known to process temporal information, and moving rhythmically while listening to a melody can improve auditory processing. In three interrelated behavioural experiments, we demonstrate that this effect translates to speech processing. Motor priming improves the efficiency of subsequent naturalistic speech-in-noise processing under specific conditions. (i) Moving rhythmically at the lexical rate (~1.8 Hz) significantly improves subsequent speech processing compared to moving at other rates, such as the phrasal or syllabic rates. (ii) The impact of such rhythmic motor priming is not influenced by whether it is self-generated or triggered by an auditory beat. (iii) Overt lexical vocalization, regardless of its semantic content, also enhances the efficiency of subsequent speech processing. These findings provide evidence for the functional role of the motor system in processing the temporal dynamics of naturalistic speech.