University students were the subjects of three experiments designed to determine the usefulness of elliptic speech in investigating the perception of the phonological structure of continuous speech. Five naturally spoken and five synthesized paragraphs were recorded in two different randomizations of phonological distortions and at two different signal to noise ratios. All three experiments tested the comprehensibility of the paragraphs. The synthesized paragraphs were found to be so nearly incomprehensible that they were effectively excluded from the results. Data indicated that: (1) comprehensibility decrement under phonological distortions is consistently lower for nasality, voicing, and place than for vowels; (2) although veridical reconstruction decreased, subjects found the speech more comprehensible in the presence of masking noise than when the signal was unimpeded by noise, indicating that a less available acoustic signal enables subjects to hypothesize a lexical match from other sources of knowledge; (3) the consistency of the results makes it reasonable to infer that responses to elliptic speech can be employed to assess continuous speech processing; and (4) a heuristic strategy employed in the perception of continuous speech seems to be "Pay attention to stressed vowels." Data are presented in graphic and tabular form. (JB)