In an effort to improve speech recognition, we investigated the effect of the number of clusters. In usual LBG clustering, the number of codebook clusters is doubled on each bifurcation and hence cannot be chosen arbitrarily in a natural way. To have the number of clusters at our control, we combined adaptive resonance theory (ART2) with LBG and perform the clustering in two stages. The codebook thus formed was used in subsequent processing of fuzzy vector quantization (FVQ) and HMM for speech recognition tests. Compared to conventional LBG, our method was shown to reduce the best recognition error rate by 0${sim$}0.9% depending on the vocabulary size. The result also showed that between 400 and 800 would be the optimal number of clusters in the limit of small and large vocabulary speech recognitions of isolated words, respectively.