The learned parametric mixture method is presented for a canonical cost function based ICA model on linear mixture, with several new findings. First, its adaptive algorithm is further refined into a simple concise form. Second, the separation ability of this method is shown to be qualitatively superior to its original model with prefixed nonlinearity. Third, a heuristic way is suggested for selecting the number of densities in a learned parametric mixture. Finally, experiments have been conducted to show the success of this method on the sources that can either be sub-Gaussian or super-Gaussian, as well as a combination of both the types. 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.