In this study, the recognition experiments for Korean vowel are performed using peripheral auditory model. In addition, for the purpose of objective comparison, the recognition experiments are performed by extracting LPC cepstrum coefficients for the same speech data. The results are as follows. 1) The time and the frequency responses of the auditory model show that important features of input signal are involved in the responses of inner ear and auditory nerve. 2) The recognition results for Korean vowel show that the recognition rate by auditory model output is higher than the recognition rate by LPC cepstrum coefficients. 3) The adaptation phenomenon of auditory nerve provides useful characteristics for the discrimination of vowel signal.