In this paper, a two-stage recognition approach based on error pattern hypotheses is proposed to reduce errors of a connected digit recognizer. In the approach, a conventional recognizer is first used to produce N-best candidate strings, and then error patterns are hypothesized by examining the candidate strings. For substitution error pattern hypotheses, error-pattern-dependent classifiers having more discriminative power than the first-stage classifier are used ; and for insertion and deletion errors, word duration and energy contour information are exploited are exploited to discriminated confusing pairs. Simulation results showed that the proposed approach achieves 15% decrease in word error rate for speaker-independent Korean connected digit recognition when a hidden Markov model-based recognizer is used for the first-stage classifier.