Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

I present a theory of discourse interpretation based on the hypothesis that the common ground of a conversation contains a record not only of complete speech acts, but, more in general, of each action of uttering a contribution to the conversation: single words, word fragments, and fillers. I call the action of uttering a "minimar contribution a MICRO CONVERSATIONAL EVENT. This model can serve as the basis for accounts of reference resolution in spoken conversations, as well as the interaction between parsing, repair, and reference resolution.