Adaptation to frozen babble in spoken word recognition.

Previous research has shown that listeners can adapt to particular samples of noise, a phenomenon known as "frozen noise" [Langhans and Kohlrausch, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 91, 3456-3470 (1992)]. However, no studies have reported a similar effect for multi-talker babble. The results of this study comparing open-set word recognition in multi-talker babble showed that listeners are significantly more accurate when the babble is fixed than when the babble is random. This documents the effect the authors refer to as "frozen babble."