⬇️ Prefer to listen instead? ⬇️
- A study found that rhythmic movement greatly improves speech understanding in noisy places.
- Speaking aloud before listening gets the motor system ready and helps understanding.
- Tapping at the natural speech rate (1.8 Hz) lines up brain timing with sounds expected.
- Training the brain using rhythmic activity could help people with hearing trouble and ADHD.
- Rhythmic prep works best when you move actively, not just listen without moving.
Speech Understanding: Can This Simple Trick Help?
Do you ever have trouble knowing what someone is saying in a loud restaurant or busy café? Many people do, and new science shows a surprisingly simple way to help you understand speech better in noisy places: rhythmic movement. Things like tapping your finger or saying a word aloud before you listen might stir your brain in just the right way. This can help you focus, listen better, and catch what is being said, even when noise tries to drown it out.
Why It’s Hard to Hear in Noisy Places
Understanding speech when there is noise is one of the brain’s hardest listening jobs. It is not just about speech being louder or clearer. It is about how the brain sorts, guesses, and fills in missing bits. Here is why background noise makes things much harder:
Other Sounds Overwhelm the Listening System
In places with many sounds, like busy roads, open offices, or full cafes, background noise breaks up the clear speech signal. Your brain has to use special focus to tell the speaker’s voice apart from noise that does not matter. This uses up mental energy and brain power.
Sorting Sounds Becomes Hard
People sort sounds, which is how the brain separates sounds coming in and puts them with their source. In noisy places, doing this separation gets hard. Sounds from different places overlap and mix together. This makes it harder to pull one voice out from the others.
Speech Loses Its Timing and Beat
Clear speech has a beat and timing patterns that let your brain guess what is coming next. Background noise hides these patterns, leaving gaps in what you hear. When this timing is broken, it is harder to know sounds, find where words start and end, and follow sentence structures.
Context and Meaning Get Harder to Use
We often use context and what things mean to guess what someone might be saying, even before they finish. In a noisy place, those hints are not complete or are lost. This needs more brain work and short-term memory to fill in the missing parts.
Listening Gets Tiresome
Trying hard again and again to figure out spoken words in noise makes you tired from listening. This is true especially for people who do not hear well or have focus problems. Over time, mental focus gets weaker, making speech understanding even worse.
So, understanding speech in noisy places uses many skills – listening, moving, and thinking. And maybe, rhythm is the key piece that is missing.
The Motor System’s Role in How We Hear
It might seem strange, but how we move, or get ready to move, can change how we hear. This link shows an interesting partnership between systems for moving and sensing.
Movement Is More Than Just Action
We usually see the motor system as what controls body actions: walking, reaching, or speaking. But brain scientists are now finding out its deeper thinking jobs, especially with timing and guessing what happens next. Movement can help arrange how we hear by giving a frame for what to expect: when something will happen, how fast, and for how long.
Brain Rhythms Help Guessing
Just like skilled dancers know a beat is coming, the brain can know the beat of speech. Studies suggest that the motor part of the brain links up internal brain patterns with outside rhythms. This linking helps process things that happen at certain times, like spoken words. This is true especially when the sound is not clear.
Hearing Is an Active Process
New thinking in brain science more and more supports the idea that hearing is active. It is not just taking in sounds. It is a process of always guessing what will happen. Our brain keeps copying how things should play out and checks sounds coming in against these mental plans. Movement helps by shaping these expected timings.
Expert Opinion
“We are first of all beings of action, and perception comes later, as feedback,” says Benjamin Morillon, one of the main researchers in the study. This view changes how we see listening. It becomes a type of internally planned action, one that can be made better by controlled movement or speaking first.
New Study Finds: Rhythm Gets the Brain Ready to Listen
A new study put out in Proceedings of the Royal Society B (te Rietmolen et al., 2024) looked at how rhythmic movement helps us understand speech when listening is hard. Researchers set up three careful experiments to figure out which types of moving help, how they work, and if speaking helps as much as tapping.
Study Questions
- Can rhythmic motor activity make speech understanding better?
- Does the speed of the rhythm affect the result?
- Is any movement helpful, or must it be in time with something?
- Can speaking aloud give the same good results as moving the body?
Let’s look at what each experiment found and what it tells us about the link between movement, rhythm, and hearing.
Experiment 1: Tapping the Right Speed Helps Speech Understanding
The first experiment looked at whether the speed of rhythmic tapping changes how well we understand speech hidden by noise.
How It Was Done
People were asked to tap their finger to a rhythm for a few seconds at a certain speed before they heard a noisy sentence. After, they had to pick a main word from a list of choices. The tapping speed was set to match three natural speeds in language
- Sentence Speed (~1.1 Hz) – like the rhythm of sentences
- Word Speed (~1.8 Hz) – like the rhythm of how words are said
- Syllable Speed (~5 Hz) – like the speed syllables happen
There was also a starting point test with no tapping.
Results
The main finding? People who tapped at 1.8 Hz, the word-level, middle speed, did much better on the speech understanding tests. Tapping slower or faster, or not at all, did not help as much.
What this means: The brain links up with speech better when the rhythm of movement matches the natural speed of language. This finding shows how important lining up time is for tuning into spoken speech.
Experiment 2: Movement, Not Just Rhythm, Causes the Effect
To be sure that just hearing a rhythm or moving without a plan was not causing the improvement, the researchers added more test setups.
Different Setups
People were asked to do one of four tasks before listening
- Just listen – no rhythmic motor action
- Listen to a beat only, without moving
- Tap freely at any speed they chose
- Tap in time with an outside rhythmic beat (1.8 Hz)
What Was Seen
- All types of tapping, whether done freely or with a beat, made speech understanding better compared to just listening.
- Tapping with a rhythm showed results that were a little better.
- Just listening to a beat without moving showed no clear improvement.
What we know now: Movement is needed. It is not just the beat you hear; it is the beat you make that helps your brain figure out language under pressure.
Experiment 3: Speaking Out Loud Works Too
What about using your mouth instead of your hands? The third experiment tested if saying a word aloud (without needing to understand it) also got the brain ready for listening in noise.
What People Did
Each person was shown a verb before the noisy sentence
- In one test, they had to say the verb aloud.
- In the other, they read it silently to themselves.
Some of these verbs were connected in meaning to the test word in the sentence, while others were not connected.
Main Finding
Saying the verb aloud always made speech understanding better. This happened even when the verb was not connected to the word coming up.
What this means: The help did not come from related meanings. It came from the motor action of speaking. Again, the motor system helped the listening system tune in, no matter the language content.
Why Rhythm Makes Speech Understanding Better
What we learned from all three experiments together is powerful: rhythmic motor action, like tapping a finger or speaking aloud, makes your brain better at understanding speech in noisy places. Here is why
Timing Guesses
Rhythmic action helps your brain guess when speech events will happen, not just what they are. This helps brain linking, where brain activity matches outside rhythms. This linking makes listening better, especially when sounds are not clear because of background noise.
Motor and Listening Systems Work Together
Because nerve networks are linked, action in the motor part of the brain affects the listening part of the brain. This connection fine-tunes how sound is handled. This is true especially when conditions are poor, like having background noise.
Making Focus Stronger
Rhythmic actions make the brain’s focus window smaller using a kind of timing spotlight. When you expect sound at exact times, you listen very closely at those moments, which helps you know and recall things better.
Being Active Is Better Than Relaxing
It is important to see that these improvements come from active movement. You must do something with your body. Just listening without moving does not cause the same effects. The brain needs to be involved, like tapping or speaking, to get ready.
How This Can Be Used Every Day
These findings are not just interesting, they are useful. Here are some times in real life where rhythmic prep can help
In Schools and Classrooms
Kids with ADHD, listening problems, or some hearing trouble might do better with tapping or speaking routines to get ready. A short rhythmic clapping activity before listening tasks can set their brains up to do well.
In Health Settings
Speech helpers might try adding robotic tapping or speaking warmups to help people who have trouble knowing words or clear speech.
For People Who Do Not Hear Well
More studies are needed, but rhythmic motor training might boost the ability to process the sound signal that is left in people with some hearing loss. It could help by making timing and focus better.
In Busy, Noisy Places
Before you go into a loud meeting, party, or restaurant, tap your fingers at a steady speed or say a word or two aloud. This might give your brain the prep it needs to focus better on the voices around you.
Brain Training and What Could Happen Next
Over time, using rhythmic techniques with digital tools could start a new area in brain training. Think about what is possible
- Brain apps that tell you to tap or speak at certain times before you listen to complex audio.
- New ways to help older people or stroke patients who have trouble with timing.
- Routines that help the brain change, fixing listening pathways using motor inputs.
As studies grow, rhythmic prep could become a main strategy for brain health and care for senses and nerves.
What This Study Did Not Cover
While the study shows exciting things, it is based on certain conditions
- All tests happened in noisy sound places. What happens in quiet or very structured speech settings is not known.
- Music ability and sense of rhythm were not checked. Future studies might show some people benefit more than others.
- The methods were used before, not during, listening. Rhythmic feedback that is always on might change the results.
- Rhythms in different cultures and languages are not the same. What works in one language setting might not work smoothly in another.
What’s Next in Brain-Based Listening Studies?
Top researchers like Benjamin Morillon are looking at harder questions about how we feel time and how the brain and body line up rhythms in different cultures, ages, and with different problems.
Future experiments might look at
- How motor rhythm links to music training or movement problems.
- Brain scans (like fMRI or EEG) tracking brain action during rhythmic prep.
- How much mental copies (“thinking of dancing”) help us hear.
In the end, putting together motor guessing and sounds coming in may be key to a brain-based way of listening, where timing is everything.
Tips to Listen Better in Noisy Places
Here are some simple things anyone can try
- Tap your finger at about 1.8 beats each second before going into a noisy place.
- Say a single word aloud to make your listening systems ready.
- Make a regular rhythm habit so you do it without thinking.
- Use rhythmic breathing before important talks. It might help in a similar way.
- Try metronome apps or sound feedback tools to train timing and focus.
Last Thoughts
Understanding speech in noisy places is not just about how loud things are or how clear they are. It is about rhythm, timing, and getting ready. Using your motor system, by tapping, moving, or speaking, can help prepare your brain to guess and handle what you hear better. As this study shows, a simple tap or spoken word is more than just a small thing you do. It is a way to listen smarter and sharper, helped by lining up rhythms.
So next time you ask, “Can you say that again?”—think about tapping first.
Citation
- te Rietmolen, N., Strijkers, K., & Morillon, B. (2024). Moving rhythmically can facilitate naturalistic speech perception in a noisy environment. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2025.0354
