The plasticity of the representations for words in the mental lexicon under exposure to another speaker's voice has often been explored by observing imitative behaviours. In the study, we investigated if phonological convergence across speakers may facilitate spoken word recognition in non-native regional accent. Eighteen Northern French-speakers were exposed to CVC words recorded by a native speaker of Southern French. These speakers first realized either a shadowing task or a semantic categorization task that entailed no overt speech production and then all did a lexical decision task. The imitation of the non-native regional accent was found in shadowing but did not appear to facilitate later recognition of words.