A voice recognition method and apparatus in which a scalar time-space field pattern lattice plane having an abscissa and an ordinate, with one being the time axis and the other the space axis, is obtained from a voice signal inputted as a recognition object, and a voice characteristic pattern based upon said time-space pattern is to be formed as a standard pattern or to be matched with a standard pattern to recognize a characteristic of the inputted voice. The scaler time-space field pattern is converted to extract a vector field pattern lattice corresponding to each lattice point of the scalar time-space field pattern lattice plane with each vector of the vector field pattern lattice having a quantity and an angular orientation value. The angular orientation values of the vector field pattern lattice are placed into one of N groups, each group corresponding to a range of vector angular orientation values, and a set of N two dimensional lattices are formed with each lattice corresponding to one of the vector angular orientation ranges and each point of the lattice having the quantity parameter of the corresponding point of the vector field pattern lattice. The patterns of the N two dimensional lattices have the voice characteristic information can be used as standards or to be matched with standard patterns. There can be blurring processing of the quantity values of the N two dimensional lattices to account for speech variations, such as between male and females, and the resulting lattices of the blurring processing used as standards or for matching.