Abstract: The present invention processes an independent body of speech during an enrollment process and creates a set of speaker specific enrollment parameters for normalizing analysis parameters including the speaker's pitch, the frequency spectrum of the speech as a function of time, and certain measurements of the speech signal in the time-domain. A particular objective of the invention is to make these analysis parameters have the same meaning from speaker to speaker. Thus after the pre-processing performed by this invention, the parameters would look much the same for the same word independent of speaker. In this manner, variations in the speech signal caused by the physical makeup of a speaker's throat, mouth, lips, teeth, and nasal cavity would be, at least in part, reduced by the pre-processing.