It has been known that there is strong relationship between human voices and the movements of the articulatory facial muscles. In this paper, we utilize this knowledge to implement an automatic speech recognition scheme which uses solely surface electromyogram (EMG) signals. The EMG signals were acquired from three articulatory facial muscles. Preliminary, 10 Korean digits were used as recognition variables. The various feature parameters including filter bank outputs, linear predictive coefficients and cepstrum coefficients were evaluated to find the appropriate parameters for EMG-based speech recognition. The sequence of the EMG signals for each word is modelled by a hidden Markov model (HMM) framework. A continuous word recognition approach was investigated in this work. Hence, the model for each word is obtained by concatenating the subword models and the embedded re-estimation techniques were employed in the training stage. The findings indicate that such a system may have a capacity to recognize speech signals with an accuracy of up to 90%, in case when mel-filter bank output was used as the feature parameters for recognition.