10. A method for recognizing speech comprising: receiving an analog input speech signal; processing said analog input speech signal to provide a sequence of feature vectors from said input speech signal at predetermined speech frame intervals; associating at least one mask vector with each sequence of a plurality of reference vectors which have been organized in sequence with each of said reference vector sequences corresponding to a word which can be recognized, with said mask vector being indicative of the significance of portions of the reference vector sequence with which it is associated in establishing the identity of the word to which the respective reference vector sequence corresponds; comparing each of said feature vectors with each of said plurality of reference vectors in relation to the status of the respective mask vector associated with each said reference vector sequence; determining a distance measure with respect to each of said reference vectors for each successive feature vector in said sequence of feature vectors in response to the comparison therebetween wherein portions of each said reference vector sequence indicated by the associated at least one mask vector corresponding thereto to be insignificant are ignored such that said distance measure is based upon significant portions of the reference vector sequence; and recognizing words in accordance with the distance measures between each of said reference vector sequences and successively received feature vectors corresponding to respective speech frames.
10. A method for recognizing speech comprising: receiving an analog input speech signal; processing said analog input speech signal to provide a sequence of feature vectors from said input speech signal at predetermined speech frame intervals; associating at least one mask vector with each sequence of a plurality of reference vectors which have been organized in sequence with each of said reference vector sequences corresponding to a word which can be recognized, with said mask vector being indicative of the significance of portions of the reference vector sequence with which it is associated in establishing the identity of the word to which the respective reference vector sequence corresponds; comparing each of said feature vectors with each of said plurality of reference vectors in relation to the status of the respective mask vector associated with each said reference vector sequence; determining a distance measure with respect to each of said reference vectors for each successive feature vector in said sequence of feature vectors in response to the comparison therebetween wherein portions of each said reference vector sequence indicated by the associated at least one mask vector corresponding thereto to be insignificant are ignored such that said distance measure is based upon significant portions of the reference vector sequence; and recognizing words in accordance with the distance measures between each of said reference vector sequences and successively received feature vectors corresponding to respective speech frames. 11. A method as set forth in claim 10, wherein said feature vectors, said reference vectors and said mask vectors are binary, and wherein said distance measure-determining step comprises a Hamming distance measurement between said feature vector and a corresponding reference vector as modified in accordance with a respective mask vector associated therewith.