A study of the utterances of young children, aged 7 to 22 months, is described. These utterances, varying in length from one to 17 syllables, contain only suprasegmental information because the verbal content was incomprehensible to hearers who were not acquainted with the child and the situation in which the utterances occured. In the corpus, certain variables analyzed instrumentally were isolated, particularly duration and contour. Three experiments on the utterances were carried out: (1) a group of adults, not professional linguists, were asked to comment on the utterances they heard; (2) a second group, students in phonetics, were asked to judge the semantic value of the utterances by classifying them as interrogatives, non-interrogatives, or other; and (3) a third group of listeners was asked to determine the contour of the last syllable of each utterance. Of the utterances in the second experiment, 13% were ambiguous, and in the third group, 14% were ambiguous. In addition to distinguishing certain cases of ambiguity in the perception of melodic curves, the study illuminated diverse types of relations between the judgment of the semantic value of an utterance and perception of its substance. (AMH)