In this paper, we carried out the word, 4 continuous digits. continuous, and task-independent word recognition experiments to verify the effectiveness of the re-defined phoneme-likely units (PLUs) for the phonetic decision tree based HM-Net (Hidden Markov Network) context-dependent (CD) acoustic modeling in Korean appropriately. In case of the 48 PLUs, the phonemes /ㅂ/, /ㄷ/, /ㄱ/ are separated by initial sound, medial vowel, final consonant, and the consonants /ㄹ/, /ㅈ/, /ㅎ/ are also separated by initial sound, final consonant according to the position of syllable, word, and sentence, respectively. In this paper. therefore, we re-define the 39 PLUs by unifying the one phoneme in the separated initial sound, medial vowel, and final consonant of the 48 PLUs to construct the CD acoustic models effectively. Through the experimental results using the re-defined 39 PLUs, in word recognition experiments with the context-independent (CI) acoustic models, the 48 PLUs has an average of 7.06%, higher recognition accuracy than the 39 PLUs used. But in the speaker-independent word recognition experiments with the CD acoustic models, the 39 PLUs has an average of 0.61% better recognition accuracy than the 48 PLUs used. In the 4 continuous digits recognition experiments with the liaison phenomena. the 39 PLUs has also an average of 6.55% higher recognition accuracy. And then, in continuous speech recognition experiments, the 39 PLUs has an average of 15.08% better recognition accuracy than the 48 PLUs used too. Finally, though the 48, 39 PLUs have the lower recognition accuracy, the 39 PLUs has an average of 1.17% higher recognition characteristic than the 48 PLUs used in the task-independent word recognition experiments according to the unknown contextual factor. Through the above experiments, we verified the effectiveness of the re-defined 39 PLUs compared to the 48PLUs to construct the CD acoustic models in this paper.