  Speech is a multiplexed signal displaying levels of complexity,
organizational principles and perceptual units of analysis at distinct
timescales. This critical acoustic signal for human communication is thus
characterized at distinct representational and temporal scales, related to
distinct linguistic features, from acoustic to supra-lexical. This chapter
presents an overview of experimental work devoted to the characterization of
the speech signal at different timescales, beyond its acoustic properties. The
functional relevance of these different levels of analysis for speech
processing is discussed. We advocate that studying speech perception through
the prism of multi-time scale representations effectively integrates work from
various research areas into a coherent picture and contributes significantly to
increase our knowledge on the topic. Finally, we discuss how these experimental
results fit with neural data and current dynamical models of speech perception.
