1. A word recognition system for identifying a spoken word independent of the speaker thereof, wherein the spoken word is represented by an analog speech signal, said word recognition system comprising: signal conditioning means including energy measuring circuit means and zero-crossing detector means for receiving an input analog speech signal and providing word-discrimination information as a sequence of feature vectors based solely upon enery measurements as provided by said energy measuring circuit means and the zero-crossing rate of the input analog speech signal as determined by said zero-crossing detector means to the exclusion of other speech parameters; memory means storing a plurality of reference templates of digital speech data respectively representative of individual words comprising the vocabulary of the word recognition system, the vocabulary consisting of a relatively small number of words with each of the words included in the vocabulary being represented by a reference template, each of said reference templates corresponding to a word acoustically distinct from other words included in the vocabulary; each of said reference templates being defined by a predetermined plurality of reference vectors arranged in a predetermined sequence and comprising an acoustic description of an individual word in a time-ordered sequence of acoustic events, each reference vector corresponding to one of the acoustic events as determined by a zero-crossing rate and an energy measurement of a reference analog speech signal corresponding to an individual word and representing a plurality of probabilistic events corresponding in number to the total number of values potentially assumable by a feature vector such that each of the probabilistic events is based upon the relative likelihood of occurrence of an acoustic event therein as compared to the other probabilistic events of the same reference vector; means operably coupled to the outputs of said energy measuring circuit means and said zero-crossing detector means of said signal conditioning means for extracting feature vectors from said input analog speech signal, an acoustic event being described by the value of each feature vector; means operably associated with said feature vector extracting means for comparing each feature vector of said input analog speech signal with the corresponding reference vectors of each of said reference templates to provide a distance measure with respect to each of the reference vectors in the predetermined sequences defining acoustic descriptions of the respective words included in the vocabulary of the word recognition system; and means for determining which one of the plurality of reference templates is the closest match to said input analog speech signal based upon a cumulative cost profile as defined by the respective distance measures provided by comparisons of each feature vector of said input analog speech signal with the reference vectors included in the predetermined sequences of reference vectors defining the plurality of reference templates.
6. A word recognition system as set forth in claim 1, further including word-pair discrimination means for compensating for the bias caused by the tendency of one word in a given pair of words to be falsely recognized as the other word of the pair such that interpretation of the cumulative cost profile provided by comparisons of each fature vector of said input analog speech signal with the reference vectors included in the predetermined sequences of reference vectors defining the plurality of reference templates by said determining means is improved in selecting the reference template representative of the correct word of the given word-pair.