In order to shed light on a specific theory of peripheral auditory representation (drawn from work by Zwicker and recently formalized by Schroeder, Atal, and Hall) we have used data on how listeners match two‐formant vowels to four‐formant stimuli. We report on two experiments designed to test the hypothesis that such listeners determined their favoredF2′ according to a distance measure (adapted from Plomp) formulated in terms of such auditory representations. This theory models the auditory transformation of the acoustic signal as a conversion of the power spectrum into a sones/Bark representation by computing critical‐band densities and applying a (basilar membrane‐like) frequency smearing function. The computed pseudoauditory vowel distance measure was found to correlate very highly with the listeners judgments of vowel‐quality distance obtained from the two experiments described, which involved the comparison of numerous vowel pairs from reportedF2′ data. The results suggest that a model of peripheral auditory representation is available which would be useful as a building block in any theory of speech perception.