II. THE STUDY ABSTRACT A desirable long-range goal in building future speech understanding systems would be to accept the kind of language people spontaneously produce. We show that people do not speak to one another in the same way they converse in typewritten language. Spoken language is finer-grained and more indirect. The differences are striking and pervasive. Current techniques for engaging in typewritten dialogue will need to be extended to accomodate the structure of spoken language.
