In the first major section, our concern is with the perception of speech. Dealing first with the perceptual integration and differentiation of acoustic cues, we take into account that the acoustic information relevant to a phonetic segment is typicaly diverse, widely distributed through the signal, and thoroughly overlapped with information relevant to other segments. Other subsections contain plans for research on phonetic segment perception over variations in prosody and rate of articulation, perception of prosody and rate over variations in phonetic structure, the processes by which a listener arrives at categorical phonetic percepts, synthesis of speech by rule, and, finally, (cerebral) hemispheric specialization for speech. The second major section deals with the processes of reading in the beginner and in the adept. In the first subsection we outline our plans for studying processes important in reading stretches of text longer than the word, with emphasis on the requirements of short-term memory that languages impose. The second subsection deals with processes in lexical access, the emphasis here being on the role of explicit awareness of linguistic structure and on the importance to the reader of having a command of the phonological rules that the orthography presupposes. Attention is also given here to studies that explore the matter of lexical access across languages and across orthographies. The third subsection deals with the manner in which the reader organizes the letters into larger units.