A method and apparatus for coding successive pitch periods (Fig. 5) of a speech signal. Based on a priori knowledge of statistical properties of successive speech periods, a shaped lattice structure is designed to cover the most probable points in the pitch space. The codebook index search starts with finding an open-loop estimate in the pitch space considering all dimensions and refining the open-loop estimate in a closed-loop search separately in each dimension based on the shaped lattice structure. The closed-loop search for the first subframe is for obtaining an absolute pitch period or a delta pitch while the closed-loop search for each of the other subframes is for obtaining a delta pitch for the respective subframe.