This paper presents the effects of different phone-like-unit (PLU) sets in order to propose an optimal PLU set for the performance improvement of Korean automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. The examination of 9 currently used PLU sets indicates that most of them include a selection of allophones without any sufficient phonetic base. In this paper, a total of 34 PLU sets are designed based on Korean phonetic characteristics arid the effects of each PLU set are evaluated through experiments. The results show that the accuracy rate of each phone is influenced by different phonetic constraint(s) which determine(s) the PLU sets, and that an optimal PLU set can be anticipated through the phonetic analysis of the given speech data.