Speech Typically words are converted to phonemes in one of two ways: either by looking the words up in a dictionary (with possibly some limited morphological analysis), or by sounding the words out from their spelling using basic principles. • Dictionary Lookup • Letter to Sound Both appt~oaches have their advantages and disadvantages; dictionary lookup fails for unknown words (., proper nouns) and letter to sound rules fail for irregular words, which are all too common in English.
