Glossary of Linguistic Terms

Phonological Hierarchy

Definition: 

Phonological hierarchy is a ranking that organizes a stream of speech into levels of ascending size and complexity.

Here are the levels of the phonological hierarchy:

Units at one level of the hierarchy cluster together to form units of the next higher level. At each level, speech can be segmented into units that have similar kinds of phonetic features.

Source: 

Glossary Hierarchy