Publications

Consonant identification rates were measured for vowel-consonant-vowel tokens gated withN-talker babble noise and babble-modulated noise for an extensive range of N, at a fixedsignal-to-noise ratio. In the natural babble condition, intelligibility was a nonmonotonic function ofN, with a broad performance minimum from N=6 to N=128. Identification rates inbabble-modulated noise fell gradually with N. The contributions of factors such as energeticmasking, linguistic confusion, attentional load, peripheral adaptation, and stationarity to theperception of consonants in N-talker babble are discussed.