Speaking rhythmically improves speech recognition under "cocktail-party" conditions

This study examines whether speech rhythm affects speech recognition under "cocktail-party" conditions. Against a two-talker masker, but not a speech-spectrum noise masker, recognition of the last (third) keyword in a normal rhythmic sentence was significantly better than that of the first keyword. However, this word-position-related speech-recognition improvement disappeared for rhythmically hybrid target sentences that were constructed by grouping parts from different sentences with different artificially modulated rhythms (rates) (fast, normal, or slow). Thus, the normal rhythm with a constant rate plays a role in improving speech recognition against informational speech masking, probably through a build-up of temporal prediction for target words.