The goal of this experiment was to compare the representation of speech sounds obtained using psychoacoustical measurements with those furnished by the model of the peripheral auditory system developed by Delgutte [inRepresentation of Speech in the Peripheral Auditory System, edited by R. Carlson and B. Granström (Elsevier, New York, 1982), pp. 131–149]. We studied the perceptual representation of the initial 16 ms of the burst of the consonant /k/, in three vocalic contexts /a/,/i/, and /u/, using ipsilateral simultaneous masking. The masker was one of the three VCV sequences /aka/, /iki/, and /uku/, extracted from natural speech. The test sound was a tone burst with a duration of 16 ms and with a fixed frequency ranging from 0.840–3.400 kHz, by critical‐band steps. The test tone was located just at the beginning of the burst. The registered level of the just‐audible test tone allows one to obtain the “psychoacoustical” spectra of the beginning of the consonant burst for the three vocalic contexts. These spectra will be compared with the LPC spectra of the same portion of the signal and with “model rate profiles” (i.e., simulated average discharge rate as a function of the characteristic frequency) obtained at the output of Delgutte's model. This comparison allows for a first pyschoacoustical calibration of the model adapted to the study of speech sounds.