Speech perception is increasingly understood as a gradient, probabilistic process rather than a categorical one, shaped by linguistic experience, sociophonetic variation, and exposure to multiple speech norms. Across global Englishes, listeners do not simply map acoustic signals onto fixed phonemic categories; instead, they evaluate fine-grained phonetic cues in relation to their expectations about speakers, accents, and communicative contexts. This study adopts a cross-varietal perspective to examine how gradient perception operates across English varieties, with particular attention to Nigerian English, British English, and American English. From a broad theoretical standpoint, the work situates speech perception within usage-based and exemplar models, emphasizing the role of frequency, phonetic detail, and social meaning in shaping perceptual judgments. Narrowing the focus, the study investigates how listeners from these three English backgrounds perceive selected speech sounds that are known to exhibit systematic variation across varieties, such as vowel quality and consonantal timing cues. Using controlled perceptual tasks, the research evaluates whether listeners show categorical boundaries aligned with their native variety or demonstrate gradient sensitivity that reflects exposure to multiple English norms. The findings indicate that perception is not uniform across groups: British and American listeners tend to show stronger alignment with inner-circle phonetic norms, while Nigerian listeners display heightened flexibility, reflecting contact with multiple models of English. Importantly, all groups exhibit gradient responses rather than rigid categorical decisions, suggesting that variation is encoded continuously in perceptual space. By integrating global Englishes into experimental speech perception research, this study contributes to a more inclusive understanding of how linguistic diversity shapes auditory processing. The results underscore the need to move beyond monolithic models of “native” perception and highlight the relevance of World Englishes in advancing theories of speech perception, phonological representation, and language variation in a globalized communicative landscape.