When first encountering an unknown dialect or accent listeners may first have problems understanding what is being said. However, studies show that listeners are able to adopt to a speaker's pronunciation during the course of conversation. In the current study, German, Swedish and Finnishstudents listened to a 15 minute text in German modified to simulate a new dialect. Subsequently they performed a lexical decision task where words according to this dialect appeared. Results from these tasks showed that German mother tongue speakers failed to adapt to the dialect. However, Swedish subjects did adopt. Finnish mother tongue speakers on the otherhand, did not seem to adopt to the same extent as the swedes. The results suggest, that the different results between Germans, Swedes and Finns are induced by different perception and language approach in mother tongue speakers and L2-learners. The language perception System seams to be more flexible in L2-Learners whereas it is more static in mother tonguespeakers of the same language. Furthermore it is suggested, that different phonological structures between the mother tongues of L2-learners have different implications on the adaption to speech in the foreign language. If the phonological structure of one mother tongue language differs much from the foreign language to be learned, phonological adaptation seams to be more difficult.