In songbirds, auditory neurons of the nucleus HVC respond selectively to a particular complex sound, the bird's own song (BOS). In the canary, this song selectivity did not exclude responses to conspecific songs. Here, we recorded single units in nucleus HVC of adult canaries to assess to what extent repertoire sharing among birds contributed to auditory responsiveness to birds' songs other than the BOS. Results indicated that song phrases driving auditory responses could differ from bird's own phrases suggesting that a subset of neurons were not strictly tuned to acoustic features of self-generated song components. In the canary, auditory representation of the BOSs might be more complex than that which has been described for birds with a small repertoire.