In practical applications of speech recognition, one of the fundamental questions might be on the number of training data that should be provided for a specific task. Though plenty of training data would undoubtedly enhance the system performance, we are then faced with the problem of heavy cost. Therefore, it is of crucial importance to determine the least number of training data that will afford a certain level of accuracy. For this purpose, we investigate the effect of the number of training data on the speaker-independent speech recognition of isolated words by using FVQ/HMM. The result showed that the error rate is roughly inversely proportional to the number of training data and grows linearly with the vocabulary size.