Word segmentation errors occurring in text preprocessing often insert incorrect words into recognition vocabulary and cause poor language models for Korean large vocabulary continuous speech recognition. We propose an automatic word segmentation algorithm using Markov chains and syllable-based n-gram language models in order to correct word segmentation error in teat corpora. We assume that a sentence is generated from a Markov chain. Spaces and non-space characters are generated on self-transitions and other transitions of the Markov chain, respectively Then word segmentation of the sentence is obtained by finding the maximum likelihood path using syllable n-gram scores. In experimental results, the algorithm showed 91.58% word accuracy and 96.69% syllable accuracy for word segmentation of 254 sentence newspaper columns without any spaces. The algorithm improved the word accuracy from 91.00% to 96.27% for word segmentation correction at line breaks and yielded the decomposition accuracy of 96.22% for compound-noun decomposition.