This paper investigates the effect of interframe spectral dependence in speech on the recognition accuracy of HMM-based speech recognition systems. It is proposed that the Markov chain model (MCM) may be used to account for the spectral dependence between frames. Experiments on isolated word recognition have shown that using the MCM as a complement to the HMM in recognition can achieve improved recognition approximately by 1-6 percentage points as compared to HMM-based systems.