  Attempts at building an unified description of the strong, weak and
electromagnetic interactions usually involve several stages of spontaneous
symmetry breaking. We consider the effects of such symmetry breaking during an
era of primordial inflation in supergravity models. In cases that these occur
along flat directions at intermediate scales there will be a succession of
short bursts of inflation which leave a distinctive signature in the spectrum
of the generated scalar density perturbation. Thus measurements of the spectral
index can directly probe the structure of unified theories at very high energy
scales. An observed feature in the power spectrum of galaxy clustering from the
APM survey may well be associated with such structure. If so, this implies a
characteristic suppression of the secondary Doppler peaks in the angular power
spectrum of temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background.
