This paper reviews the literature related to the acoustic–phonetic analysis of speech and the speech recognition approaches that use these types of knowledge. At first, acoustic–phonetic cues that are important for recognition of different sound units are presented. This include description of the acoustic–phonetic events, literature related to analysis and automatic detection of the events, and significance of the events in automatic speech recognition. Next, different speech recognition approaches are discussed and the literature related to the use of acoustic–phonetic knowledge by these approaches are reviewed. Finally, different approaches are compared and a framework suitable for recognition of phones present in syllable-like units is proposed. © 2018, © 2018 IETE.