A speech communication system and method with an improved method for handling lost information during transmission from an encoder to a decoder. More specifically, the improved speech communication system can more accurately recover lost information about a speech frame, such as line spectral frequency (LSF), pitch lag (or adaptive codebook excitation), fixed codebook excitation and/or or gain information. To handle missing LSFs, the improved speech communication system sets the minimum spacing between LSFs to an increased value, and then optionally decreases this value for subsequent frames in a controlled adaptive manner. To deal with a missing pitch lag, the improved system estimates the pitch lag for the missing frame by extrapolating from the pitch lags of previously received frames. When the improved decoder receives the pitch lag of a subsequently received frame, the system uses a curve fit between the pitch lag of the previously received frame and the pitch lag of the subsequently received frame in order to fine-tune its response to the An estimate of the pitch lag of the lost frame is used to adjust and correct the adaptive codebook buffer before it is used by subsequent frames. In dealing with loss gain parameters, the improved system estimates loss gain parameters depending on whether the speech is periodic or aperiodic, whether the loss gain parameters are adaptive codebook gain parameters or fixed codebook gain parameters, and other factors , such as the average adaptive codebook gain parameter of an adaptive number of subframes of previously received frames, the ratio of the adaptive codebook excitation energy to the total excitation energy, the spectral tilt of previously received frames and/or the previously received frame energy. If the speech communication system does not send fixed codebook excitation values to the decoder, the improved encoder/decoder generates the same random excitation values for a given frame using a seed value whose value is determined by information in that frame. After estimating loss parameters in a lost frame and synthesizing speech, the improved system matches the energy of the synthesized speech to the energy of a previously received frame.