Abstract: A speech recognition arrangement where nonspectral features of the input signal, e.g., energy and voicing parameters, are used to effectively remove non-speech events from consideration but only after a time warping procedure based solely on the input and reference pattern spectral parameters has been completed. The time warping procedure is not unduly complex because there is no need to weight spectral and nonspectral parameters in matching input and reference patterns. For each reference pattern, the time warping procedure defines a scan region of the input signal to be used in evaluating the nonspectral input signal characteristics. Energy and voicing parameters are useful in distinguishing non-speech events since speech patterns typically have few very low-energy frames (other than frames that are part of a gap within a vocabulary item) and more than a minimum number of voiced frames, e.g., frames corresponding to vowel sounds.