This study attempts to test the classifying performance of a neural network and thereby examine its applicability to the signals distorted in a shallow water environment. Linear frequency modulated(LFM) signals are simulated by using an acoustic model and also measured through sea experiment. The network is constructed to have three layers and trained on both data sets. To get normalized power spectra as feature vectors, the study considers the three transforms : shot-time Fourier transform (STFT), wavelet transform (WT) and pseudo Wigner-Ville distribution (PWVD). After trained on the simulated signals over water depth, the network gives over 95% performance with the signal to noise ratio (SNR) being up to-10 dB. Among the transforms, the PWVD presents the best performance particularly in a highly noisy condition. The network performs worse with the summer sound speed profile than with the winter profile. It is also expected to present much different performance by the variation of bottom property. When the network is trained on the measured signals, it gives a little better results than that trained on the simulated data. In conclusion, the simulated signals are successfully applied to training a network, and the trained network performs well in classifying the signals distorted by a surrounding environment and corrupted by noise.