When listeners first experience speech that is either spoken very rapidly or has been artificially compressed, there is usually a short period of time during which they find it difficult to understand the speaker. However, with experience, they improve. This improvement reflects adjustments that may be occurring at a number of different levels of speech processing. The purpose of the current study was to further investigate the nature of the adjustments that occur when listeners are asked to recognize highly compressed speech. The first experiment examined adjustment to compressed speech as a function of the amount of exposure, using two different speakers and two different compression rates. The results of this experiment confirm that adjustment to highly compressed speech occurs over a number of sentences. Moreover, the gradient of adjustment depends on the compression rate. Lower compression rates required less experience before full adjustment was obtained. A second and third exper...