Spoken-word recognition is an efficient and generally error-free process that occurs under a variety of speaking and listening conditions. The talk will focus on the mapping process between the speech signal and access of form and meaning. The nature of the representation that supports spoken-word recognition will be discussed with a focus on the consequence of ambiguity and mismatching information. Research has been conducted in the past few years suggesting that activation of lexical representations is accomplished via feature mapping. It is argued that this architecture permits lexical activation given incomplete or erroneous input. Phonological variation and some recent work concerning representation and processing of common variants will also be discussed.