Abstract: Disclosed herein are methods and apparatus for improving the quality of synthesized speech that is transmitted through a channel that is susceptible to transmission errors. In a presently preferred embodiment of the invention a speech signal is assumed to be first encoded using a Linear Predictive Coding (LPC) technique prior to transmission. The parameters that describe the short-term spectral behavior of the speech signal are received and then applied to and processed by a non-linear median processing block only on an occurrence of a predetermined number of transmission errors in the received LPC speech signal. The median-processed short term speech parameters are subsequently employed, together with a received excitation signal, in a synthesis filter to synthesize a speech signal of improved quality over what would be obtained if the short term speech parameters were not median processed to compensate for the transmission errors.