Title: Toward an understanding of speech glimpsing Abstract: In everyday listening environments speech is often heard in the presence of background sound sources. These environmental sounds often interact with the target speech through masking or interference, resulting in listeners experiencing greater difficulty understanding the target message. Addressing this problem of understanding speech in adverse listening conditions entails the ability to resolve partial information. One model for defining the availability of partial information involves defining “glimpses” of target speech at momentarily favorable signal-to-noise ratios. The contribution of these speech glimpses to intelligibility involves understanding properties of the preserved target speech, interactions with the competing background, and abilities of the listener. Findings suggest that access to slow amplitude modulation properties (under 8 Hz) is critical for speech recognition. Furthermore, interference of these speech modulations by background noise is detrimental to recognition. Acoustic analyses of speech glimpses that index the proportion and distribution of information can capture average performance for speech recognition in speech-modulated noise. However, significant individual variability is often observed, particularly among older adults. Initial work assessing multiple perceptual and cognitive abilities is underway to explain this individual variability in glimpsing abilities. Overall, these findings support temporal sampling models of speech perception and the crucial role of speech amplitude modulation necessary for maximal speech recognition in adverse listening conditions.