Tapping your fingers could help you cut through the noise

Media release

The rhythm is gonna help you - Tapping your fingers to a beat before listening in noisy environments makes it easier to understand people. Participants were tasked with listening to a long sentence embedded in noise and those that primed themselves by either listening to a musical beat or generating it themselves with finger tapping, were significantly better at identifying which words they heard. The findings could inform strategies for language learning and rehabilitation, the authors said. Proceedings B

The rhythm is gonna help you – Moving rhythmically can facilitate naturalistic speech perception in a noisy environment

This study explores how rhythmic motor priming can enhance natural speech comprehension in noisy environments. Key findings include: - Tapping at the lexical rate significantly improves subsequent speech processing efficiency compared to other rates. - The benefits of rhythmic motor priming are comparable whether self-generated or externally triggered by an auditory beat. - Overt lexical vocalization, regardless of semantic content, also enhances speech processing. These results highlight the functional role of the motor system in tracking the temporal dynamics of natural speech. This research has implications for improving speech comprehension in challenging listening conditions and may inform strategies for language learning and rehabilitation.