This paper presents an overview of several most commonly used temporal and spectral processing -methods for the enhancement of degraded speech. Three major sources of degradation, namely, background noise, reverberation and speech from the competing speakers, have been considered. Temporal processing refers to processing the degraded speech in the time domain, for enhancing the speech components. Spectral processing refers to processing the degraded speech in the frequency domain. After the review, the paper concludes with a summation that considers the possibility of combined Temporal and Spectral Processing (TSP) approach for the enhancement of degraded speech. Copyright © 2009 by the IETE.