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Successful participation in a spoken discourse places stringent demands on both the speaker and the listener. The speaker must produce utterances that cohere with what has been said earlier, while the listener must discover how what the speaker is saying can be related to what has just been said. The listener maintains a constantly developing mental representation of the current discourse, and the communicative success of a subsequent utterance largely depends on the extent $0-which the appropriate linkages can be established between the utterance and this discourse representation. Given this perspective on language in context, a fundamental issue concerns the cognitive coaditions under which the speaker and the listener jointly handle the complex processing dependencies between them. In this preliminary study, we approach this issue from the perspective of a theory of the listener, by confronting a naturally produced discourse with a set of analytic questions that derive from a theory of speech comprehension. In doing this, we make the basic, and plausible assumption that the ways humans produce speech are necessarily closely adapted to the ways that humans can comprehend speech. Thus, by examining speech production from the perspective of speech comprehension, we should-be able to add to our overall understanding of both aspects of language use.