In the course of listening to an utterance, how can the listener infer how long the utterance is going to be altogether? If this information is available at an early point, it allows to rule out on-line all instances of total utterance structure possible, which do not fit the anticipated window. Hence, decoding effort would be disburdened immensely. The model introduced in this connection gives an integrating view on prosodic surface phenomena such as phrasing/euphony as well as rhythm/isochrony, tracing the temporal organization of different units to a common deeper level representation referred to as the Quantitative Organization of speech (QO).