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Example: What Baby Hears--This is speech as a Baby might percieve it. Babies have no phonemic overlay by which to partition the speech they hear. Hence, the phonemes in speech, which seem so discrete to you and I as adults, are absent in the perception of the child. They hear just the continuous stream of modulated vocalization. From this stream, they do preceive the distinctive features which are the building blocks of phonemes. Using these, they will rapidly begin to build a phonemic overlay for themselves of the language they are hearing.
Could you construct an English phonemic overlay in six months without any formal instruction from this stream of sound? Babies do. Of course some graduate students claim my lectures sound like this too!