Understanding speech in challenging listening environments relies on diverse streams of information, including sensory signals, prior knowledge, and expectations. This is a challenge for patient populations who have compromised bottom-up sensory information. Neural entrainment evaluations can offer insights into the effects of signal degradation on speech processing. We collected electroencephalography from normal hearing listeners, in order to evaluate the effects of spectro-temporal information removal on speech intelligibility and cortical tracking. Our results showed a decrease in speech intelligibility with increased degradation and a decrease in encoding accuracy for the degraded conditions, compared to the clean control, but no differences in encoding accuracy between degradation conditions. We found significant differences between the weights of temporal response functions of clean and degraded speech conditions, which were specific to each type of degradation.