A speech recognition method includes the steps of receiving input speech containing vocabulary, processing the input speech with a grammar to obtain N-best hypotheses and associated parameter values, and determining whether a first-best hypothesis of the N-best hypotheses is confusable with any vocabulary within the grammar. The first-best hypothesis is accepted as recognized speech corresponding to the received input speech if the first-best hypothesis is not determined to be confusable with any vocabulary within the grammar. Where the first-best hypothesis is determined to be confusable, at least one parameter value of the first-best hypothesis can be compared to at least one threshold value, and accepting the second-best as the recognized speech, if its confidence score is within certain lower and upper threshold values and is not confusable with the first-best. The first-best hypothesis can be accepted as recognized speech corresponding to the received input speech, if the parameter value of the first-best hypothesis is greater than the threshold value.