1. A method for recognizing speech containing a plurality of significant phonemes, said method comprising the steps of: constructing a profile of a characteristic of each significant phoneme; generating a difference profile for substantially each pair of significant phonemes by subtracting the profile of each significant phoneme from the profile of each other significant phoneme; identifying adjacent sections of each difference profile which exceed positive and negative thresholds respectively; computing the likelihood that an unknown phoneme will be one or the other of a phoneme pair based on the relative areas in the identified sections of the difference profile; constructing an equivalent profile of a phoneme of an unknown utterance; and choosing the more likely phoneme of each phoneme pair based onthe relative areas in the identified sections of the profile of the unknown phoneme.