How can we understand fast-flowing speech? Ordinary speech may not strike us as particularly fast, but it fleets by inexorably, leaving no trace. We must be quick about processing it, because it will not last. While we are making sense of what we are just hearing, there is more coming in, and our working memory has very limited capacity. The CLUMP project research team is investigating the ways in which humans chunk up real-time speech rapidly into processable, meaningful units that enable them to succeed in making sense of it.