Mishearings are occasioned by contextual assumptions and situational affordances

• Mishearings are listeners' spontaneous perceptions of speakers' utterances that deviate from the latters' wordings.
• Mishearings are overwhelmingly situation-appropriate, and classifiable into a small number of contextual types.
• Mishearings are often followed by interactional sequences that include repair.
• Mishearings seldom lead to permanent misunderstandings.
• They contradict linear and support dialogical models of utterance understanding.

This article is an empirical study of 220 mishearings in Swedish conversations. A mishearing is defined as a specific perception that appears in a hearer's mind immediately after a speaker's source utterance, and is lexically discrepant from what the speaker actually said.Starting from a dialogical meta-theory, the paper is a study of how mishearings are nearly always situation-appropriate; they invoke relevant contextual assumptions. A systematic coding of mishearings yield a classification based on types and subtypes of participants' references to current topic, situational referents and other topics near-at-hand.At a theoretical level, this article has ramifications for a general theory of utterance understanding, and also more specifically for the theorising of repair and misunderstanding.