This paper describes a syntax oriented spoken Japanese understanding system named "SPOJUS-SYNO". At first, this system makes word HMMs automatically by concatenating syllable-based (trained) HMMs. Then a word lattice is hypothesized by using a word spotting algorithm and word-based HMMs. Finally, the time- synchronous left~to-right parsing algorithm is executed to find the best word sequence from the word lattice according to syntactic knowledge represented by CFG. This system was implemented in the "UNIX-QA" task with the vocabulary size of 521 words. Experimental result shows that the sentence understanding rate was about 80% for six male speakers.