In this report, we shall outline a specific approach to the analysis and recognition of speech phonemes based on the fundamental principles of processing in the auditory nervous system. The system consists of particular implementations of the three conceptual stages mentioned above: The cochlear transformations of speech sounds into spatiotemporal patterns (stage 1); the subsequent feature extraction by the central neural networks (stage 2); and the use of various adaptive nets to identify the acoustic features of speech phonemes (stage 3). We shall illustrate the utility of this approach in identifying and organizing the invariant features of nine American English vowels.