Methods and systems are provided for assisting operation of a vehicle using speech recognition. One method involves automatically identifying a parameter value for an operational subject based at least in part on a preceding audio communication with respect to the vehicle and thereafter recognizing an audio input as an input command, determining a second operational subject associated with the input command, and automatically commanding a vehicle system to implement the parameter value for the operational subject when the second operational subject maps or otherwise corresponds to the operational subject associated with the parameter value. In this regard, the second operational subject may be conveyed by a user enunciating placeholder terminology that maps to the operational subject as part of the input command.