6. A speech recognition method comprising: receiving an acoustic description of an utterance to be recognized, including a succession of acoustic descriptions representing a sequence of sounds associated with the utterance; storing a vocabulary of words; storing a plurality of sound-sequence models and using individual ones of said sound-sequence models to represent at least a part of more than one word, each of said models comprising a succession of probabilistic acoustic models modeling a sequence of sounds associated with each word represented by said sound-sequence model; using linear time alignment to compare a succession of acoustic descriptions from said utterance to be recognized against the succession of acoustic models from each of a plurality of sound-sequence models, and for producing a sound-sequence score for each such sound-sequence model as a result of its comparison; using the sound-sequence score produced for a given sound-sequence model as a result of its comparison to calculate a word score for each of a plurality of words associated with that sound-sequence model.
6. A speech recognition method comprising: receiving an acoustic description of an utterance to be recognized, including a succession of acoustic descriptions representing a sequence of sounds associated with the utterance; storing a vocabulary of words; storing a plurality of sound-sequence models and using individual ones of said sound-sequence models to represent at least a part of more than one word, each of said models comprising a succession of probabilistic acoustic models modeling a sequence of sounds associated with each word represented by said sound-sequence model; using linear time alignment to compare a succession of acoustic descriptions from said utterance to be recognized against the succession of acoustic models from each of a plurality of sound-sequence models, and for producing a sound-sequence score for each such sound-sequence model as a result of its comparison; using the sound-sequence score produced for a given sound-sequence model as a result of its comparison to calculate a word score for each of a plurality of words associated with that sound-sequence model. 7. A speech recognition method as described in claim 6 wherein said sound-sequence models are wordstart models, that is, models which only represent the initial portion of many words in said vocabulary.