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The task of speech perception involves converting a continuous, information-rich waveform into a more abstract representation. This mapping process is heavily language-dependent–every language divides up acoustic space differently, and the mapping is distorted by context-dependent phonological rules. This is not an easy job, but it is made easier in two complementary respects. During the first year of life the human perceptual apparatus is gradually optimized to better perceive the distinctions that are crucial in the ambient language’s phonological system while ignoring irrelevant variation, and phonological systems themselves are optimized from the perspective of human perception. This two-way interaction, in which perception adapts to phonology and phonology to perception, has long been of interest to phonologists, but only in recent decades have the tools necessary to explore the connection between the two become available. In this chapter we provide an overview of the debates that have arisen around each issue, as well as the research that bears on each debate (see also Hume & Johnson 2001). § 2 discusses how phonology influences speech perception, both in the native language (§ 2.1) and in non-native ones (§ 2.2), and how second language perception relates to loanword adaptations (§ 2.3). § 3 addresses the question of how perception influences phonology, beginning with an overview of the relevant typological data (§ 3.1), and concluding with a comparison of theoretical approaches to the data (§ 3.2). Finally, in § 4 we briefly consider the ramifications of the bidirectional nature of the phonology–perception interaction.