Improved speaker independent speech recognition system and method are disclosed in which an utterance by an unspecified person into an electrical signal is input through a device such as a telephone, the electrical signal from the input telephone converting the electrical signal into a time series of characteristic multidimensional vectors, the time series of characteristic multidimensional vectors are received, each of the vectors being converted into a plurality of candidates so that the plurality of phonemes constitutes a plurality of strings of phonemes in time series as a plurality of candidates, the plurality of candidates of phonemes are compared simultaneously (one at a time) with a reference pattern of a reference string of phonemes for each word previously stored in a dictionary to determine which string of phonemes derived from the phoneme recognition means has a highest similarity to one of the reference strings of the phonemes for the respective words stored in the dictionary using a predetermined word matching technique, and at least one candidate of the words as a result of word recognition on the basis of one of the plurality of the strings of phonemes which has the highest similarity to the corresponding one of the reference strings of the respective words is output as the result of speech recognition.