Rhythmic speech accelerates 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 studies extend 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 behaviourally. In a behavioural study with 89 participants, we found that increased periodic energy of both amplitude and frequency modulations prior to a turn boundary is associated with lower reaction times. Additionally, we found that participants' rating of a sentence's perceived rhythmicity predicted reaction times to the sentence. Our studies offer experimental support for the special role of rhythmicity in coordinating and speeding up the turn transfer in communication.