Abstract: In this paper, the principle of a Chinese continuous speech recognition system is introduced, the modeling and search strategies of its acoustic layer and language layer are also discussed in detail. On the basis of the research on the. traditional frame synchronous search algorithm, the statistical knowledge based frame synchronous search (SKB-FSS) algorithm is proposed. It contains three principal functional modules, generating definite search boundaries by a merging based syllable detection automaton, controlling state transitions by the statistical differential state dwell information, and restricting the syllable expansions by a word search tree and pruning unpromising paths by the dynamic forward prediction. The experimental results show the validity of the novel search strategies.