Sex Differences and Individual Consistency in Voice Identification

Results were combined from 5 experiments by Cook in 1998 with 728 participants who listened to one male voice and one female voice each saying a sentence, then attempted to recognise the voices from line-ups of six voices presented a week later. While 352 male listeners did not differ significantly in recognising female and male voices (38% correct vs 41%), 376 female listeners were significantly more likely to recognise female than male voices (51% vs 43% correct). There was no evidence for individual differences in voice recognition in that listeners who recognised the male voice were no more likely to recognise the female voice than those who failed to recognise the male voice.