29. A computer-implemented system comprising: a computer interface arranged to receive text to be synthesized as a spoken utterance; a text analyzer to analyze the received text to determine attributes of the received text; a candidate identifier to select one or more candidate utterances from a database of stored utterances based on a comparison between the determined attributes of the received text and corresponding attributes of text representing the stored utterances; a candidate selector to determine distances between respective prosodic contours of a candidate utterance and the spoken utterance using a model that relates a) distances between respective prosodic contours of pairs of the stored utterances to b) distances between attributes of text of each of the respective pairs, and to select a final candidate utterance based on the determined distances; and a memory for storing data for access by the candidate selector, the memory comprising information embodying the model used by the candidate selector, the information including, for each of the stored utterances: a prosodic contour of the respective stored utterance, one or more attributes of text of the respective stored utterance, and first data relating a difference between the prosodic contour of the respective stored utterance to the prosodic contour of a second stored utterance to a difference between a first attribute of the text of the respective stored utterance and the first attribute of the text of the second stored utterance, second data relating a difference between the prosodic contour of the respective stored utterance to the prosodic contour of a third stored utterance to a difference between the first attribute of the text of the respective stored utterance and the first attribute of the text of the third stored utterance, wherein the second stored utterance and the third stored utterance are in the stored utterances, wherein prosodic contours represent prosodic characteristics of speech at different times.
29. A computer-implemented system comprising: a computer interface arranged to receive text to be synthesized as a spoken utterance; a text analyzer to analyze the received text to determine attributes of the received text; a candidate identifier to select one or more candidate utterances from a database of stored utterances based on a comparison between the determined attributes of the received text and corresponding attributes of text representing the stored utterances; a candidate selector to determine distances between respective prosodic contours of a candidate utterance and the spoken utterance using a model that relates a) distances between respective prosodic contours of pairs of the stored utterances to b) distances between attributes of text of each of the respective pairs, and to select a final candidate utterance based on the determined distances; and a memory for storing data for access by the candidate selector, the memory comprising information embodying the model used by the candidate selector, the information including, for each of the stored utterances: a prosodic contour of the respective stored utterance, one or more attributes of text of the respective stored utterance, and first data relating a difference between the prosodic contour of the respective stored utterance to the prosodic contour of a second stored utterance to a difference between a first attribute of the text of the respective stored utterance and the first attribute of the text of the second stored utterance, second data relating a difference between the prosodic contour of the respective stored utterance to the prosodic contour of a third stored utterance to a difference between the first attribute of the text of the respective stored utterance and the first attribute of the text of the third stored utterance, wherein the second stored utterance and the third stored utterance are in the stored utterances, wherein prosodic contours represent prosodic characteristics of speech at different times. 34. The system of claim 29 , wherein selecting the one or more candidate utterances includes selecting utterances from the database that have lexical stress patterns that substantially match lexical stress patterns of the received text.