10. The system of claim 9 , the acoustic grammar phonemically representing the one or more syllables in accordance with acoustic elements of an acoustic speech model, wherein each syllable is represented by acoustic elements for an onset, a nucleus, and a coda.
9. A system for providing out-of-vocabulary interpretation capabilities and for tolerating noise when interpreting natural language speech utterances, the system comprising: at least one input device that receives an utterance from a user and generates an electronic signal corresponding to the utterance; and a speech interpretation engine that receives the electronic signal corresponding to the utterance, the speech interpretation engine operable to: recognize a stream of phonemes contained in the utterance; map the recognized stream of phonemes to an acoustic grammar that phonemically represents one or more syllables, the recognized stream of phonemes mapped to a series of one or more of the phonemically represented syllables; and generate at least one interpretation of the utterance, wherein the generated interpretation includes the series of syllables mapped to the recognized stream of phonemes.