Vowel elision is a common phonological process whereby an unstressed /ə/ (schwa) vowel is deleted during pronunciation. In three syllable words, the deleted /ə/ occurs in the medial posttonic position (different /dIfr schwant/ → [dIfr schwant]). In two syllable words, the deleted /ə/ occurs in the first syllable (police /polis/ → [plis]). These elided versions (reduced form) are commonly accepted as alternatives to canonical (full form) pronunciations. Two auditory form priming experiments used vowel elision to investigate the effects of phonological variability on lexical access. Subjects were asked to make a lexical decision to either the full (canonical) or reduced (elided) version of a target word after being primed by either the full or reduced form of the same word or an unrelated control. For both experiments, the results showed that the reduced version was a less effective prime than the full version. Accuracy rates indicated that the two syllable reduced versions were less acceptable variants. The results suggest an asymmetry in the effects of vowel elision in speech recognition and are discussed in terms of similarity mapping and representation of lexical form.