A new word model is trained from synthetic word samples derived by Monte Carlo techniques from one or more prior word models. The prior word model can be a phonetic word model and the new word model can be a non-phonetic, whole-word, word model. The prior word model can be trained from data that has undergone a first channel normalization and the synthesized word samples from which the new word model is trained can undergo a different channel normalization similar to that to be used in a given speech recognition context. The prior word model can have a first model structure and the new word model can have a second, different, model structure. These differences in model structure can include, for example, differences of model topology; differences of model complexity; and differences in the type of basis function used in a description of such probability distributions.