In this paper, we introduce a phone vector discrete HMM(PVDHMM) that decodes a phone sequence string, and demonstrates the applicability to spoken document retrieval. The PVDHMM treats a phone recognizer or large vocabulary continuous speech recognizer (LVCSR) as a vector quantizer whose codebook size is equal to the size of its phone set. We apply the PVDHMM to decode the phone sequence strings and compare the outputs with those of a continuous speech recognizer(CSR). Also we carry out spoken document retrieval experiment through PVDHMM word spotter on the phone sequence strings which are generated by phone recognizer or LVCSR and compare its results with those of retrieval through the phone-based vector space model.