The frequencies and co-occurrence distributions of some of the prosodic features in the speech of children are discussed. The emphasis is on the determination of systems and structure of non-segmental lectal variability in the children's speech without primary reference to function. The primary data consisted of selected episodes of connected speech from six Tyneside (England) children, three boys and three girls, aged 4.7 to 5.9 years. The episodes are all taken from tape-recordings in naturalistic settings in the children's homes. The system of analysis that was used treats prosodic features organized into independent, but interacting systems. The discussion of the research treats: (1) some of the similarities in the children's speech by examining details of the tone units which they realize; (2) some of the more important differences between the frequency distributions of nuclear tones in localized Tyneside and non-localized speech; and (3) overlapping representations of tonic frequency distributions among the children. The study showed that it is possible to establish significant patterns of variation in the non-segmental systems of a number of children. It has shown patterns of development towards localized intonational systems and indicated some important non-linguistic co-variates of intonational structure. (AMH)