Noting that the lack of prosodic information in printed text may be a source of difficulty for children who are learning to read, this paper explores the features of language underlying the acoustic and perceptual segmentation of sentences into meaningful units. Using evidence from studies in speech production and perception, the paper addresses two issues: (1) What principles of sentence organization should guide the physical segmentation of text as an aid for poor readers? and (2) What intrasentence units, if made explicit, would best facilitate children's induction of effective reading comprehension strategies? Throughout this inquiry, two types of sentence organization are discussed--syntactic organization, and information processing organization. The first part of the paper examines the nature of speech units by looking at sentence perception, and describes some assumptions of comprehension processes that serve as a conceptual framework for later discussion of several psycholinguistic approaches to the study of immediate processing units in speech perception. The second part considers studies of speech production and describes the prosodic features of spoken sentences and their complex relationship to syntactic organization and information "packaging." (HOD)