Speech predictability can hinder communication in difficult listening conditions

In difficult listening situations, such as in noisy environments, one would expect speech intelligibility to improve over time thanks to noise adaptation and/or to speech predictability facilitating the recognition of upcoming words. We tested this possibility by presenting normal-hearing human listeners (N = 100; 70 women) with sentences and measuring word recognition as a function of word position in a sentence. Sentences were presented in quiet and in competition with various masker sounds at individualized levels where listeners had 50% probability of recognizing a full sentence. Contrary to expectations, recognition was best for the first word and gradually deteriorated with increasing word position along the sentence. The worsening in recognition was unlikely due to differences in word audibility or word type and was uncorrelated with age or working memory capacity. Using a probabilistic model of word recognition, we show that the worsening effect probably occurs because misunderstandings generate inaccurate predictions that outweigh the benefits from accurate predictions. Analyses also revealed that predictions overruled the potential benefits from noise adaptation. We conclude that although speech predictability can facilitate sentence recognition, it can also result in declines in word recognition as the sentence unfolds because of inaccuracies in prediction.