Continuous speech is recognized by selecting among hypotheses, consisting of candidates of symbol strings obtained by connecting phonemes corresponding to a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) having the highest probability, by referring to a phoneme context dependent type HMM from input speech using a HMM phoneme verification portion. A phoneme context dependent type LR (Left-Right) parser portion predicts a subsequent phoneme by referring to an action specifying item stored in an LR (Left to Right) parsing table to predict a phoneme context around the predicted phoneme using an action specifying item of the LR table.