1. A speech recognition system, comprising: an elementary recognizer for classifying the elementary segments of an observed speech pattern as they are received, said elementary recognizer including correlation means for producing at an output node of said elementary recognizer a score of correlation of said elementary segments with stored spectral speech patterns; and a plurality of local decision modules each connected to said output node for receiving said score of correlation; said plurality of local decision modules being connected at node points in a network wherein different network paths through the nodes and their corresponding local decisions modules represent an accumulation of speech segments constituting different pronunciations of said speech pattern, the input of each said local decision module connected to said correlation means to receive the measures of correlation; each local decision module specializing in a particular network node and including, means for determining the probability of how well the input segment of speech matches the particular sound segments associated with a given node, means for receiving from the other local decision modules the prior correlation scores of all preceding sound segments, means for selecting the locally optimum time warping of each segment of speech which are input from other local decision modules, and accumulator memory means for providing an accumulated correlation score for any one path in the network of local decision modules, said path representing an accumulation of segments or parts of a word or sound; whereby the accumulated correlation score represents the most probable pronunciation of said speech pattern and the best recognition match derived from all the possible paths in the network of local decision modules.