1. A method of processing speech, comprising: processing a speech sample to identify a list of candidate words potentially contained in the a speech sample, wherein at least some of the candidate words are alternative candidate words corresponding to the same or an overlapping portion of the speech sample, permuting at least some of the candidate words from the identified list of candidate words, to create a plurality of potential syntactic structures corresponding to the speech sample, comprising candidate words with word pronunciation boundaries that do not conflict with respective word pronunciation boundaries of other candidate words of the respective potential syntactic structure; and selecting one of the potential syntactic structures as corresponding to the speech sample.