25. A system adapted to process speech, comprising: an input receiving a speech sample; a processor adapted to: (a) identify a list of candidate words potentially contained in the 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, (b) 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 a respective potential syntactic structure; and (c) selecting one of the potential syntactic structures as corresponding to the speech sample; and an output presenting information responsive to the selecting.
25. A system adapted to process speech, comprising: an input receiving a speech sample; a processor adapted to: (a) identify a list of candidate words potentially contained in the 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, (b) 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 a respective potential syntactic structure; and (c) selecting one of the potential syntactic structures as corresponding to the speech sample; and an output presenting information responsive to the selecting. 33. The system of claim 25 , wherein each of the potential syntactic structures is assigned a score or probability.