Native listeners can use semantic context more efficiently than non-native listeners in order to recognize words masked with noise. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data were acquired during a retroactive semantic priming task in order to investigate the neural correlates of speech intelligibility and the interaction between semantic relatedness and native language. Participants were better at recognizing words masked with noise at different signal to noise ratios (SNR) when followed by semantically related compared to unrelated words in their native language. In their non-native language, participants performed better for semantically unrelated word pairs, providing evidence for differences in semantic processing between native and non-native languages. fMRI results revealed that activation in premotor regions negatively correlated with SNR while activation in regions composing the resting state network positively correlated with SNR. I conclude that motor regions are recruited during effortful speech comprehension.