1. A speech recognition processor for processing an input speech utterance in a speech recognition system, comprising: a spectral measure module receptive of the input speech utterance for computing spectral measures of the input speech utterance for predetermined time frames; a time spectral pattern stage for concatenating a plurality of successive spectral measures for generating a spectral pattern vector; a linear discriminant module for computing an initial raw similarity value for each sound classification unit by computing the dot product of a linear discriminant vector with the time spectral pattern vector; a normalization module which accesses normalized values computed based upon training utterances, said normalization module finding corresponding normalized values for each said initial raw similarity value to provide a normalized similarity value and concatenating normalized similarity values to form a similarity vector, said initial raw similarity value concatenating the initial raw similarity values to form a similarity vector; and a word matcher module for comparing said similarity vector with pre-stored reference vectors.