Contextual Prediction Tunes the Tempo of Speech Segmentation

Speech comprehension draws on both temporal structure and contextual prediction, yet how these mechanisms coordinate is poorly understood. Time-compressed speech provides a controlled probe: by degrading temporal structure, it reveals the architecture of ordinary speech comprehension. Using 3x compression with silence insertion, we varied delivery rate, temporal regularity, and boundary alignment (syllabic vs. time-defined) across two behavioural experiments. Comprehension peaked near the upper theta boundary and declined at slower and faster rates. Temporal regularity helped only when boundaries coincided with syllabic onsets, while periodic pacing alone was insufficient. Contextual predictability (word-level entropy) facilitated comprehension when temporal cues were least effective, but only under syllabic segmentation. Computational modeling confirmed that {beta}-mediated contextual prediction selectively benefited syllabic-aligned conditions, was detrimental under time-based segmentation, and better reproduced human pattern overall. Together, these results suggest that contextual prediction is continuously active but behaviorally visible only when temporal scaffolding is insufficient and syllabic structure is preserved.