In the absence of a comprehensive theory of the oral language, very little is really known about auditory decoding as a speech dynamic process in either L2 or L1. Since listening comprehension presupposes an orderly conversion of running speech into discrete linguistic units, certain restoration processes (operating on phonated speech as the input for listening) must apply. Thus, it is possible to view speech perception as a mirror‐image of speech production processes. Listening comprehension can then be seen to require two types of recovery rules: restoration to reverse the effects of absorption and boundary marking to facilitate the decomposition of the quasi‐uninterrupted acoustic signal into isolate lexical items.The approach adopted here provides a principled way to explain the striking metamorphosis language undergoes fromdynamic speech representationstocitation form strings, under listening conditions, and suggests speech perception strategies helpful to L2 listeners for acquiring and improving listening comprehension skills. The account of performance characteristics presented here shows that speech event and formal content belong to separate domains of language, mediated not so much by derivation as by covariat