A Structured approach to pronunciation

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the consensus as to where this point should be has shifted over the years. When more-fraditional systems were developed, memory was very tight and hence the number of base types had to be kept low regardless of any errors. In recent years technological developments have eased the pressure on memory, making more-abstract representations possible. Given this, there is more choice over where exactly the ideal representation should he. In fact, as we shall see in Chapter 16, the most-successfiil systems adopt a quite-phonemic representation and avoid any rewriting to a phonetic space if at all possible. Because of this, the pronunciation component in modem systems is in fact much simpler than was peihaps the case in older systems, and quite often the input to the synthesiser is simply canonical forms themselves, direct from the lexicon. 

From these trees, we can access the information we require the phonemic context can be read directly by accessing a phoneme s neighbours the syllable structure is presented as a tree, and from tiiis we can distinguish between /s t/ in a syllable onset in strength and offset in last. 

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