Most of the papers in this volume were originally presented at the Symposium on Coherence in Spontaneous Text, held at the University of Oregon in the spring of 1992. The main theme running through this volume is that coherence is a mental phenomenon rather than a property of the spoken or written text, or of the social situation. Coherence emerges during speech production-and-comprehension, allowing the speech receiver to form roughly the same episodic representation as the speech producer had in mind.