Abstract: An apparatus and method of determining parameters of a statistical language model for automatic speech recognition systems using a training corpus are disclosed. To improve the perplexity and the error rate in the speech recognition, at least a proportion of the elements of a vocabulary used is combined so as to form context-independent vocabulary element categories. The frequencies of occurrence of vocabulary element sequences, and if applicable, the frequencies of occurrence of derived sequences formed from the vocabulary element sequences through the replacement of at least one vocabulary element by the associated vocabulary element class, are evaluated in the language modeling process. The parameters of the language model are then derived from the evaluated frequencies of occurence.