The relationship between the development of a phonological system and auditory perception was studied by examining children's errors in discriminating among a group of English consonants. The perceptual equivalence and additivity of linguistic features were studied. A nonmetric multidimensional analysis procedure was used in an attempt to specify the number of processes by which children made decisions, and speculations about the nature of these processes were made. The discrimination errors of the children were similar to those of adults, except that the children produced more errors. The results failed to show that current linguistic descriptions identify the perceptual parameters children use in categorizing speech sounds.