Word segmentation (phonological awareness) is the process, either cognitive or computational, of identifying and separating discrete word units from a continuous stream of spoken language, relying significantly on the listener's or system's ability to perceive and utilize the phonological structure and cues present in the speech signal. This concept represents a critical challenge in spoken language processing, particularly for young language learners acquiring the ability to parse continuous speech into meaningful units, and is a fundamental task in computational linguistics and natural language processing systems designed for automatic speech recognition and understanding, where accurate boundary detection is essential for downstream linguistic analysis.