We propose a new approach to Temporal Decomposition (TD) of characteristic parameters of speech for very low rate coding applications. The method models the articulatory dynamics employing a hierarchical error minimization algorithm which does not use Singular Value Decomposition. It is also much faster than conventional TD and could be implemented in realtime. High exibility is achieved with the proposed method to comply with the desired coding requirements, such as compression ratio, accuracy, delay, and computational complexity. This method can be used for coding spectral parameters at rates 1000-1200 b/s with high delity and an algorithmic delay of less than 150 msec.