We investigated on the submission of multiple candidates in speaker-independent speech recognition by VQ/HMM. Submission of fixed number of multiple candidates has first been examined. As the number of candidates increases by two, three, and four, the recognition error rates were found to decrease by 41%, 58%, and 65%, respectively compared to that of a single candidate. We tried another approach that the candidates within a range of Viterbi scores are submitted. The number of candidates showed geometric increase as the admitted range becomes large. For a practical application, a combination of the above two methods was also studied. We chose the candidates within some range of Viterbi scores and limited the maximum number of candidates submitted to five. Experimental results showed that recognition error rates of less than 10% could be achieved with average number of candidates of 3.2 by this method.