This paper summarizes recent findings on the effects of talker variability on speech perception. The results of several experiments demonstrate that detailed information about a talker is encoded into multi-layered representations in long-term memory. These representations appear to be much more detailed than the canonical symbolic representations of speech that linguists have traditionally assumed. The representations also appear to be highly context-dependent and apparently preserve a great deal of information in the speech signal. The usefulness of these representations for optimal strategies of lexical access is discussed.