This paper presents an account of the use of syllable structure as the basis for a novel approach to speech recognition. This contrasts with the serial organization of more conventional phonetic segments, and their use in speech recognition systems. It is demonstrated that working with syllables provides the basis for linguistically motivated speech recognition using the previously reported notion of the Pseudo-Articulatory Representation (PAR). The results are very promising taking into account the preliminary nature of the work and the novelty of the approach. A related paper [1] deals with theoretical issues in greater depth.