Rhythmic Speech Facilitates Turn-Taking

Temporal regularity of acoustic modulations in speech is known to facilitate processing. Prior work found that regularity helps speech listeners to anticipate the timing of upcoming speech, allowing them to form temporal predictions that speed up downstream processing. The current study extends this evidence to the domain of communicative interaction: While it has been described that rhythmicity accompanies turn transitions, there is no evidence that this rhythmicity indeed facilitates turn-taking behaviorally. In a behavioral study with 89 participants, we found that increased periodic energy of both amplitude and frequency modulations prior to a turn boundary is associated with faster turn transitions. Additionally, we found that participants' rating of a sentence's perceived rhythmicity predicted response times to the sentence. Our studies offer evidence for the special role of rhythmicity in its different aspects for coordinating and speeding up the turn transfer in communication.