ABSTRACT
Speech is our 'most natural communication modality’ (Lea, 1980). It is our primary medium of communication and something which, from a very early age,
most of us are able to employ in our daily lives. How we learn the subtle rules of syntax and grammar are still not fully understood and this is perhaps why it is so difficult to develop such a framework artificially. What is clear, however, is that speech is a ‘familiar, convenient, [and] spontaneous part of the capabilities the human brings to the situation of interacting with machines’ (Lea, 1980).
