A method and apparatus for coding a quasi-periodic speech signal. The speech signal is represented by a residual signal generated by filtering the speech signal with a Linear Predictive Coding (LPC) analysis filter. The residual signal is encoded by extracting a prototype period from a current frame of the residual signal. A first set of parameters is calculated which describes how to modify a previous prototype period to approximate the current prototype period. One or more codevectors are selected which, when summed, approximate the error between the current prototype period and the modified previous prototype. A multi-stage codebook is used to encode this error signal. A second set of parameters describe these selected codevectors. The decoder synthesizes an output speech signal by reconstructing a current prototype period based on the first and second set of parameters, and the previous reconstructed prototype period. The residual signal is then interpolated over the region between the current and previous reconstructed prototype periods. The decoder synthesizes output speech based on the interpolated residual signal.