Auditory and motor priming of metric structure improves understanding of degraded speech.

Speech comprehension is enhanced when preceded (or accompanied) by a congruent rhythmic prime reflecting the metrical sentence structure. Although these phenomena have been described for auditory and motor primes separately, their respective and synergistic contribution has not been addressed. In this experiment, participants performed a speech comprehension task on degraded speech signals that were preceded by a rhythmic prime that could be auditory, motor or audiomotor.