Two studies examined children's perceptual biases in extracting or identifying words from the stream of speech. In one study, evidence for the salience of stressed and final syllables was found. Young children less frequently omitted those syllables from their productions and produced unstressed and nonfinal syllables less accurately. A second study explored the possibility that attention to the stress pattern, or overall intonation contour, of a speech sequence may assist in children's identification of words. Where subjects were required to identify referents for words on the basis of either stress pattern or phoneme sequence, 3-year-olds were more likely than adults to make choices based on intonational similarity. These observations suggest that children are more likely than adults to include intonation as an important part of the representation for a word. They are also at least consistent with the view that stress pattern may be extracted as part of the representation of a word and may, in some cases, serve to define a word for a child. (MSE)