A biologically plausible algorithm is proposed for phoneme recognition that makes use of spikes for computation. The prototype system is demonstrated on voiced phonemes and shows competitive performance with state-of-the-art systems on a vowel dataset in the presence of noise. Using novel phase locking cues, the algorithm performs surprisingly well down to SNR values as low as 5 dB, where the performance of the baseline algorithm used for comparison drops considerably. These results suggest, not only a possible explanation for the extreme noise robustness of human recognition, but also a novel technique for information processing for speech signals with computers.