In spontaneous spoken dialogue, one partner’s contributions shape another’s at several grains, including the phonetic, lexical, and pragmatic. No one disputes that such adaptation occurs; instead, the debate involves what drives adaptation, and how it unfolds. I will present experimental evidence that even so-called automatic language processes can be agile, and that partner-specific adaptation (audience design) can emerge from the earliest moments of processing (even when a partner’s perspective differs from one’s own). The evidence raises speculations about the cognitive and neural underpinnings of dialogue: To what extent might partner-specific adaptation be explicit, and to what extent is it implicit? And what neural circuits might be recruited to support processes such as perspective taking or the monitoring of grounding cues during language processing?

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