Listeners rapidly adjust to talkers' pronunciations, accommodating those pronunciations into the relevant phonemic category to improve subsequent perception. Previous work has suggested that such learning is restricted to pronunciations that are representative of how the speaker talks (Kraljic, Samuel, & Brennan, 2008). If an ambiguous…

Listeners are faced with enormous variation in pronunciation, yet they rarely have difficulty understanding speech. Although much research has been devoted to figuring out how listeners deal with variability, virtually none (outside of sociolinguistics) has focused on the source of the variation itself. The current experiments explore whether…