Speech recognition is highly sensitive to adverse conditions at all stages of the speech chain, i.e., the sequence of events that transmits a message from the mind/brain of a speaker through the acoustic medium to the mind/brain of a listener. Adverse conditions can originate from source degradations (e.g., disordered or foreign-accented speech), environmental disturbances (e.g., background sounds with or without energetic masking), and/or receiver (i.e., listener) limitations (e.g., impaired or incomplete language models, peripheral deficiencies, or tasks with high cognitive load). (For more on this classification system, see Mattys, Davis, Bradlow, & Scott, 2012, Language and Cognitive Processes, 27). This talk will present a series of studies focused on linguistic aspects of these various possible sources of adverse conditions for speech recognition. In particular, we will demonstrate separate and combined influences of the talker’s language background (a possible source degradation), the presence of a background speech masker in either the same or a different language from that of the target speech (a possible environmental degradation), and the listener’s experience with the language of the target and/or masking speech (a possible receiver limitation). Together, these studies demonstrate strong influences of language and linguistic experience on speech recognition in adverse conditions.