 Since he's an overhearer, his understanding does not affect whether A and B continue on, and while they continue to build common ground for the remainder of the conversation, C is not following or understanding them.Clark worked with Jean E. Fox Tree to study the pronunciation of ‘the’ and ‘thee’ and their use in signaling problems while speaking.What they found was that the shorter pronunciation of ‘the’, phonetically "thuh", was used far less frequently to show a problem in speech production.