A method and computer-readable medium are provided that identify prosodic word boundaries for a text. If the text is unsegmented, it is first segmented into lexical words. The lexical words are then converted into prosodic words using an annotated lexicon to divide large lexical words into smaller words and a model to combine the lexical words and/or the smaller words into larger prosodic words. The boundaries of the resulting prosodic words are used to set the prosody for the synthesized speech.