Abstract: Based on the dominant fluctuation rates, the speech information in temporal domain could be divided into temporal envelope, periodic fluctuation information and temporal fine structure. Temporal envelope cues are essential for speech recognition, which could be transmitted to cochlear implanters by cochlear imlpants. The roles of temporal envelope cues from various frequency regions in speech recognition are diverse. Influenced by the testing materials, research methods, listening backgrounds and the parameters used to extract temporal envelope, the relative weights of temporal envelope across frequency regions would change accordingly. The research methods as well as their advantages or disadvantages and research results of relative weights of temporal envelope cues in different frequency regions are reviewed, and the possible reasons why the relative weights of temporal envelope cues in different frequency regions for non-tonal language and tonal language were different were discussed simply.

Key words: temporal envelope, frequency region, relative importance, tonal language